but there are also scanners that exist which can do this job well without it being destructive to the books. The issue of course is that these scanners are by no means cheap for the average small scale user wanting to
I had gotten a bunch of SCUBA diving magazines donated to me by someone for the purpose of scanning. Maybe 200 pounds of them. And while they had some decent value on the market to collectors, there was a time tradeoff. I looked at those double camera book imaging setups, but a person has to flip every page. Vacuum assisted stuff, aluminum t-slot extrusion is sexy. But at last, the fastest way to accomplish the task at the best price (free) was to borrow friends duplex page scanner from Brother. So I cut off all the bindings. It saved so much time, it was worth it. And now the internet at large gets a high res copy of the magazines. The data is preserved as long as the copies on the internet stay around, which who knows how long that will be. Spreading the data collection to more people helps. Archive.org, torrents, mirrors, etc. ALSO, since it's so time intensive.... I think the way to really accomplish large scanning missions is have volunteers do it from home and not go to some place to do it. To make the most of ones time it's best to multitask. My friend let me borrow his sexy little Brother scanning machine that could do full duplex. I used a couple of computers (thanks to another VCF member!) to handle the OCR side of the software, so I could keep the network attached scanner as busy as possible when I had time. I would rotate through the computers triggering a scan, and they would scan and process it. I could keep 4 computers busy usually given how long it took for the OCR process. Also it allowed me to scan 4, then do the next four the next time I passed by the setup. Black and white old computer docs would be WAY easier and faster than this full color stuff I was doing. It's best if you can do some other task while scanning, so all your time isn't focused on it. Chop the bindings, stack the goods. Then when you come by drop in another batch, click go. So you can work on something else while feeding all this through. So your time isn't stuck on that one task, unless you have a lot of time. Work from homers could possible just feed stacks all day while doing other tasks, etc. It took weeks and weeks to scan through 4 banker boxes stuffed with magazines. I sold the watch ads and other bits to pay for the chopper which ran about $150. https://archive.org/details/diving_magazines Used copy machines might be able to do duplex scanning way faster, but unsure of the software support. I used Abbyy Finereader 11 for the OCR. Pack in for the Brother, works with Epson software.