Hi,
Well, a few days ago I bought a small sheet-fed scanner that had good reviews and worked with my Mac laptop.
Wow. Just Wow.
It's the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M for the Mac. It folds up into this tiny footprint (one of its selling points to me). It cost $414 ($425 with shipping) from ProVantage.
To use it, you install the software --the Print Manager and the Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0 that comes with it.
It scans about 15 - 20 pages at a time. Double-sided pages. Scanned at the rate of about 24 per minute. Both sides scanned as the sheet goes through the rollers.
Wow.
The software automatically tries to adjust the image so it is upright and centered. It succeeds a lot of the time. When I scanned 20+ pages at a time (40 actual pages of print), it would show a few pages upside down or sideways. The Acrobat software cleans that up in a second or two. Then I save the scanned group off with a filename. If a page ends up badly scanned, I can delete it out of the group with Acrobat and add a re-scanned page.
To give you some idea, it took me about a week to scan 25 pages from one of the books as it was painful to do the flatbed scans. Last night I scanned 242 pages in one evening, qc'ed them, and bundled them together in one file. And that was WITH the learning curve of the software and scanner. Tonight I'm going to watermark a few of the pages as "non-profit use only" with Acrobat.
So. This is a success. I won't be able to use it for the courses bound into books (all of the FSI African language courses, unfortunately), but for anything still paperbound like all of my DLI things, this is terrific.
The paperbound books have to be sliced out into pages, but the pages can be hole-punched again and put into 3-ring binders later. I haven't found a really good way to do this yet. I'm looking for one of those old 1960s paper cutters (you know, the iron guillotines). Right now, I'm using an Xacto knife with the book on a pad of cardboard. Then scissors to clean up the edges.
I've been using the standard scan settings. The file for the 242 pages is about 32 Mb in size. That's probably large, but it's really good quality images inside that file.
--Poetry
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