[extropy-chat] Science & Consciousness Review web site

[Brett Paatsch]

Jef Allbright wrote:

> On 12/8/05, Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>> Jef Allbright wrote:
>>
>> > I've digitized over 500 books in my library, starting about three
>> > years ago.
>>
>> Just with A4 scanners or did you pay for an A3 ?
>
> Sorry, I don't understand the relevance of your question.

My fault for that I didn't explain.

After getting over my initial reaction which was "ah he's destroying
books" I saw quite a bit of merit in what you were doing, but
thought quite a few of the books I have would be text books
that would not be easily captured with an A4 scanner.

I don't think I actually want to chop them up, but if I did I'd
want to make sure I could scan them one whole page at a
time.

An A3 would allow you to scan pages twice the size of A4.

Larger than that, A2 or A1, and one might be able to scan
newspapers (this would have appealed to me at different times)
but the scanning technology to do that efficiently is probably not
available for home use as the demand to do it wouldn't be all that
high.  A couple of years ago I paid about $600 to have a scrap
book of newspaper articles (to do with stem cell politics)
digitised. I wanted to make my scrap book accessible over the
internet.

>  I've used a
> variety of scanners, mostly limited to A4 or US Letter size.
>  The main difference being the quality and performance of the
> sheet feeders, and the cheapest ones are not worth the reliability
> problems or time required.  When I started, three years ago, I paid $750 
> for an HP
> flatbed with feeder and the feed wasn't reliable enough.  I quickly
> gained access to another HP that was about $1500 at the time and it
> did a good job.  I'm now sharing access to a Konika Minolta C350
> scanner/copier that is much faster, more reliable, and does
> double-sided in a single pass.

Thanks, you've answered my question.  I didn't mean to be rude in
the way that I put it.

Brett Paatsch