First post, by Kerr Avon
After hating the idea of e-book readers (to be fair, the first couple I tried were slow and not good picture quality), I've spent the last few years using them extensively and they are great, and so I'm trying to get all of my old books onto ebook format. Anyway, there are some that I can't find online, so I want to scan them in, and convert them via OCR, but many of the books won't open enough so that all of the page lies plush on the scanner, so is there any solution other than manually removing each page and scanning them that way. The books aren't valuable or anything (or even rare, it's some science fiction books, and a few books of collected essays) but I'd rather not destroy them if possible.
To clarify, the problem isn't that my (flat-bed) scaner won't scan, it's that the books themselves won't physically open enough so that the two pages both lie straight on the lense (or whatever you can the glass sheet) of the scanner. The pages curve back into the spine of the book, and so the text near the spine isn't scanned properly. I can solve this by removing each page from the book, and then scanning each individual page, but then I'm left with just the pages, and not the book anymore. This has to be a problem for lots of people when scanning books, so I was hoping that there was a solution that would not involve physically ripping the pages out of the books.
All but one of the books are paperback, and none of them have a two page size that's larger than A4.
