How to "Steal This Book"

Step 3 Sheetfed Scanner

I like to scan text and line art as 400dpi bitmaps. The scanners I've used did a better job that way than scanning greyscale and thresholding to bitmap later.

I've found that tiff is the best format for scans destined for pdf. Compressed or uncompressed doesn't usually matter. The files can be large, but Acrobat digests them well and the resulting pdf file is small.
DO NOT USE .JPG FORMAT!!! JPG uses "lossy" compression that fills your files with crap that can't be compressed. Use a real format like tif or gif or bmp from the good old days that isn't too smart for its own good.
New multifunction print/scan/fax machines often have a "scan to pdf" feature which might or might not do what you want. Most likely it'll use jpg format to slowly make large ugly files and then die.

You'll need to feed your book to the scanner twice, once for odd numbered page sides and once for the even sides. Do each pass into a separate directory. Then use a utility such as Thumbsplus to rename the scans so that when you put them into the same directory they'll be in the proper order. Then use Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not "reader") to assemble your files into a pdf file.

Comments

[w7mez]

What kind of software did you use for scanning?

[maxim1982]

I would use dopdf

[bmschech]

I once tried to read a big, fat paperback biography in the bathtub. Well, of course I dropped the book in the tub. Then I had the brilliant idea of drying it out in the microwave. What I didn't think of was that the glue that bound the pages to the spine of the book would melt. I was left with a stack of unbound pages. At the time, I felt pretty stupid. But now it occurs to me that this could be a good way to unbind paperbacks for scanning.

[Hextor]

Fedex/kinkos will cut the binging for you for a small fee. a lot less than your insurance deductible. when taking a college History class I was put on 16 hour days at work. every time I sat down to ready my history book I would fall asleep. I was doomed to fail the class. I cut the binding, scanned the pages. used an OCR program to turn the images into text, and then used TextAloud (www.textaloud.com) to convert the text into MP3's. I then listened to CD's of my books at work and passed the class with out actually reading the book at all.

[Dr_Stupid]

and you can then, take the unbound book, and rebind it; using one of the other instructables on this website.