Wanted - book or website recommendations

[Sip]

Re: Wanted - book or website recommendations

For a good cheap non-book specific scanner, take a look at canon's LIDE200. New is less than $80, is FAST, small, light, and produces great results for the price. Would have no problem scanning books and I see it comes with some sort of software to correct for the distortion on the side where the book fold is. I haven't messed with that feature myself so no idea how well it works.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Wanted - book or website recommendations

For a good cheap non-book specific scanner, take a look at canon's LIDE200. New is less than $80, is FAST, small, light, and produces great results for the price. Would have no problem scanning books and I see it comes with some sort of software to correct for the distortion on the side where the book fold is. I haven't messed with that feature myself so no idea how well it works.

That cheap, lightweight unit would be one of the very worst scanners to use on a rare or easily damaged book! You are actually admitting that it distorts the book, distorts it so badly that it needs software to correct it (the "it" being the scans - the software does not heal the damage caused by repeated pressing of the book onto a flimsy scanner). The scanner I cited will scan each page of the book without having to open the book more than 90 degrees, and will scan as close as about 5mm to the fold of the book. It is the only low-price scanner that is suitable for scanning fragile books.

[Sip]

Re: Wanted - book or website recommendations

I agree the book scanner is a pretty cool design.

As far as "admitting" distortions, I think you misunderstood. It's not any more distorted than it would be for normal reading. I presume the book can be opened and laid flat on a table. The distortion is caused by NOT forcing the page to be totally flat. So the point is that there are software solutions for not damaging books that go along with much cheaper scanners.

Once again, I completely agree that the book scanner is an excellent design and your recommendation is far superior than mine as I am sure you are in many aspects when it comes to dealing with rare books.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Wanted - book or website recommendations

I agree the book scanner is a pretty cool design.

As far as "admitting" distortions, I think you misunderstood. It's not any more distorted than it would be for normal reading. I presume the book can be opened and laid flat on a table. The distortion is caused by NOT forcing the page to be totally flat. So the point is that there are software solutions for not damaging books that go along with much cheaper scanners.

Once again, I completely agree that the book scanner is an excellent design and your recommendation is far superior than mine as I am sure you are in many aspects when it comes to dealing with rare books.

Opening a book flat does caus some damage to it, especially if you do it with every page in the book. And it is a slow way to scan a book. I don't know how effective this software you speak of is - will it remove the distortion without having to press down on the book, which does more damage? The scanner would have to have a lot of depth of field to be able to retain the focus into the curve of the page, and the software would have to be able to intelligently adjust the exposure of the scan for the darker area of the curve as well as reparing the visual distortion - that seems a lot to ask a scanner's hardware and software to do.

The Plustek scans without distortions as long as the text margin is not too close to the binding (so it is good for hardback books up to an A4 page size, but not for small paperbacks) and is very fast - you can scan over 100 pages in an hour. But it is an ugly-looking scanner, with software that looks like it is from the 1990s, and gives inferior scans for photographs and line drawings (they look slightly soft and - using the default settings - are off-colour compared to a normal scanner). I got mine as-new on ebay for the equivalent of $90.