Digitising Books

[fd3]

It would be exceedingly handy to have a pdf copy of the large amount of textbook that I have accumulated - especially if I go the large e-reader route.  It would also be really pace efficient.
Some of the textbooks I own can be found online, some I could buy again as a pdf/epub, but many I would need to scan.
*I could spend £600+ and more time than I care for a dedicated scanner
*or I could cut up my books and use a work scanner/printer - but this would mean having all the books in part 1, 2, 3 as there is a max scanning size (and I destroy the book)
*or I could use a phone scanning app, which would be cheap but also low quality and time consuming.

Anyone got any smart ideas?

[PaulF]

Found these people with a quick Google. https://www.pearl-scan.co.uk/scanning-services/book-scanning/?gad_source=1

Would there be any perceived copyright issues?

[Kim]

Barakta has a predecessor of https://plustek.com/gbr/products/flatbed-scanners/opticbook-3800l/index.php

The idea being that you can lay a book page flat on the edge of the scanning surface.  Which does, to be fair, work as intended.

But, even if we ignore the quirks of that particular device (chiefly that it's based on a chipset that SANE refuses to support, which means you're stuck with the dire Windows application that looks - and works - like something straight out of 2003), I wouldn't want to have to scan more than a chapter or so that way.  It's incredibly faffy.  And I say that as someone old enough to remember hand scanners.

The overhead style book scanner seems like a much better approach if you want to digitise whole books.  I assume that the associated software can correct the distortion from the binding, though I've no idea how well.

[fd3]

Cheers Paul, a good number of my textbooks were a.couple quid with postage, so I doubt I could pay someone to do it for me +and cove postage for less than twice the price.
Dunno whether the UK has a fair use academic rule for scanning of books what you own.

[lissotriton]

For textbooks, there's a lot of stuff on LibGen or Z-Library. Or you could post a request on there.

[chrisbainbridge]

I understand from colleagues that in certain parts of India you can take your hardback textbook from the library to a small office. There they will unpick it, scan it and repair it so well that nobody can tell. I used to have a pdf of a very rare textbook which was out of print that I was told had been obtained like this.

[Pickled Onion]

Dunno whether the UK has a fair use academic rule for scanning of books what you own.

It's an interesting question. Assuming you don't distribute the scanned copy there are a few scenarios:
If you scan it and destroy the original then you have a single copy of the work that you've paid to read.
If you scan it and keep the original on your bookshelf, no-one is going to know or care (and even if they did there's no loss).
If you scan it and lend the original to one of your students, then two people can be reading it at the same time, and you only paid once. Remember that the author gets paid not just from the sales of the book, but from every time someone borrows it from a library.

"Fair use" normally describes taking a copy of 5% or a single chapter.

[robgul]

I understand from colleagues that in certain parts of India you can take your hardback textbook from the library to a small office. There they will unpick it, scan it and repair it so well that nobody can tell. I used to have a pdf of a very rare textbook which was out of print that I was told had been obtained like this.

Indeed that's the case - OR, again in India, operatives will re-key complete books* at remarkable speed and minimal cost to create "new media content"

* back in the late 90s/early '00s a lot of the classified advertising in newspapers was manually re-keyed in India for publication on job advertising websites like Fish4, the Grauniad, Times/Sunday Times

[drossall]

Dunno whether the UK has a fair use academic rule for scanning of books what you own.

Fair dealing is about personal study and the need to quote things in order to comment on them, for example in reviews. Whilst it's a judgment call rather than an absolute, I don't think there are any circumstances in which it could be stretched to copying a whole work. I think 10% is often seen as the absolute limit though, like everything else around this topic, that's not set in stone, and it's absolutely not a guideline that you can copy up to 10%.

[Kim]

I believe there may be special rules pertaining to the provision of electronic copies for blind people, but I don't know the details.  Might be a publisher thing rather than law.

[fruitcake]

A good number of the books I've read and kept for future reference, I'm only interested in a few pages, and then it's just some information on those pages that's needed, and that info is not formulated as well as it could be: it would benefit from a rewrite. It's possible to improve on the source material i.e. to make it more concise or more memorable or to expand upon a concept that's been written about in the text, or to make links with concepts in other texts. For books like that, it's been worth making notes on a word processor, with details of the source material (with page numbers in case I need to look it up in future). For that I use .docx files in thematically titled folders. (I guess I could add tags in the file metadata so that those files become searchable.) The notes on each book can be as short or long as the book merits.

I guess I end up with a searchable annotated catalogue of the contents of my bookshelves, with the advantage that I can refer to the relevant pages in those books in future without having to pore over whole books to remember their contents when I want to look up something specific. The system encourages me to actually (skim) read the books I've got which in turn prompts me to discard those that are not worth keeping - a number of them will be out of date or just a bit rubbish.