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Options to scan book into ipad?

spinedoc77

spinedoc77

macrumors G4
Original poster
I have several textbooks I'd love to have on my ipad. They are not on the ibooks or amazon site, and only some of them are on the garbage coursesmart system, but they only sell in subscriptions.

I own the books, but a huge part of the reason for getting the ipad is that I was hoping eventually I could repurchase all my books on it.

Anyone attempt to scan a book in? Is there any device or service offered that would make it easier?
 
Funny I was just searching the forums for this. I have a stack of paper 9" high that makes up training manuals that's I'd like scanned. I may land a document scanner but just in case I'd like to know my options. Plus I have a few books not available in iBooks or Kindle that I'd love to scan. Those are bound though, unlike my training manual that is in 3-ring binders.
 
I purchased an industrial paper cutter and a scansnap (or snapscan, i can never remember). The scanner is nice 🙂. It comes w adobe 8 so you can make pdfs searchable, etc. I then read my book in iannotate. Kind of expensive system (and can be time consuming). There are scanners that you can use that apparently do not make yoy cut books....probably pricey.
 
spinedoc77 said:
I have several textbooks I'd love to have on my ipad. They are not on the ibooks or amazon site, and only some of them are on the garbage coursesmart system, but they only sell in subscriptions.

I own the books, but a huge part of the reason for getting the ipad is that I was hoping eventually I could repurchase all my books on it.

Anyone attempt to scan a book in? Is there any device or service offered that would make it easier?
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Nothing will make it easy. The suggestions about unbinding will make it easier. In grad school I went to a book bindery and they cut the bindings off my textbooks and drilled them for use in a 3-ring binder for about $5.

Even then, unless you save them as a (huge) pdf file you won't be able to search unless you run them through OCR which is another can of worms.

Sometimes the best answer is to do nothing.
 
The ScanSnap is great, for a lot more than books.

The LifeHacker suggestion seems ridiculous to me. My time is worth more than spending a half day to "scan" a book with a P&S camera. That just seems too much of an ordeal.

My ScanSnap came with Acrobat Pro 8. Any reason to upgrade to 9?
 
RaceTripper said:
The ScanSnap is great, for a lot more than books.

The LifeHacker suggestion seems ridiculous to me. My time is worth more than spending a half day to "scan" a book with a P&S camera. That just seems too much of an ordeal.

My ScanSnap came with Acrobat Pro 8. Any reason to upgrade to 9?
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Can you post more details on your particular setup and hardware? I'm doing a search for scansnap and am coming up with a lot of manufacturers and devices.

I don't mind taking the binding off my books as I do plan on letting go of the weight and room they take up anyhow. Is there a good bulk scanner that does a lot of pages and both sides? So far I'm only seeing about 10 page capacity.
 
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Also, I just got mine and it came with Acrobat 8 as well. It seems that is fine for my purposes but I have wondered the same thing about upgrading.
 
A faster do-it-yourself option that claims a 400 page book in 1/2 hr of scanning and then some hours of automated processing. The speed seems dubious but after achieving some efficiency it should be fairly fast.

http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-Trash-and-Cheap-C/

If you don't mind the industrial cutting of the pages out by guillotine cutting the books. A cheap digital copier that can duplex scan is ideal. Many workplaces have a bigger copier with that function. Many of those can scan to PDF. Post process with acrobat professional to do ocr and have them searchable and its a great deal. But your originally bound book loses it's binding. You could have them rebound or simply rely on your digital copies.
 
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spammerhamster said:
Do as I did, buy an all-in-one printer it'smajorly cheap and does automatic scanfeeding too.
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All-in-ones don't scale worth a damn. They're OK for a couple documents here and there, but fall short when you need to do a significant amount of scanning and OCR. Devices like the ScanSnap scan both sides without refeeding and automate the process of multi-page scanning to searchable PDF. Using an all-in-one is just not the same thing.
 
RaceTripper said:
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M

50 page capacity and it's fast. This thing rocks!
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This is the one I've looking at, it's getting great reviews. I think I'm going to pull the trigger on this one. How huge are the PDF's? Lets say a 300 page textbook might be how large a file?
 
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I highly recommend it. It is very fast and does both sides at the same time. Also, it is very small and only takes up a small corner of my desk! Someone on a review somewhere said it is the size of a loaf of bread and I would agree. 🙂 I hope you enjoy it! I love mine!
 
Just ordered one, with a newegg coupon they sent me it came out to like $380 out the door including their free shipping. Can't wait to get it, I've got a couple hundred very thick textbooks and a ton of journals. Now I'm glad I got the 64gb ipad.
 
I use a Canon all in one inkjet printer that has an ADF.
It scans around 40 pages double sided and works like a dream.
I use it in combination with Acrobat 9 (kinda expensive, but I need it for my work) which is much faster than Acrobt 8.
For scanning several 100 pages it might not be super fast, but all in all it works and I can live with it.
I have several books from Paul Theroux and they are nowhere to be find in digital form. So I used the Canon and scanned through the Happy Isles of Oceanie in around 15 batches. Took some time but was worth it for me.
Only problem is if you get below A5 size, the scanner doesn't want to pick it up in the ADF and I'm not mad enough to scan them by hand page by page, by page...
 
Yeah the one I bought from newegg comes bundled with Adobe 9 so it works nicely.

Was it a problem doing a book in multiple sections? ie: Can you put together the multiple sections back into one book if say a 200 page book has to be done in 4 scannings? Also what's your experience been with how large the files are when done?
 
I have the Adobe 8. All you have to do is go to file, combine files and then a little pop up comes up that lets you put them in order and create the file and it is done. Really painless!
 
spinedoc77 said:
Yeah the one I bought from newegg comes bundled with Adobe 9 so it works nicely.

Was it a problem doing a book in multiple sections? ie: Can you put together the multiple sections back into one book if say a 200 page book has to be done in 4 scannings? Also what's your experience been with how large the files are when done?
Click to expand...
If you bought the Mac version of the ScanSnap it comes with Acrobat Pro 8, not 9, in case that matters to you.

I won't upgrade mine to v9 as it's been out for a couple years and it seems an upgrade is now overdue.
 
RaceTripper said:
If you bought the Mac version of the ScanSnap it comes with Acrobat Pro 8, not 9, in case that matters to you.

I won't upgrade mine to v9 as it's been out for a couple years and it seems an upgrade is now overdue.
Click to expand...

I got the PC hardware which comes with Adobe 9.
 
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