Am Sonntag, 28. März 2010 schrieb Marie-Lan Tay Pamart:
I'm looking for a scanner to scan books for
Wikisource. I'm rather
confused by the quantity of products on the market, plus many reviews
focus on film scanners. Also, I need the scanner to be Mac
compatible.
Would you have some advance ? Thanks in advance.
I can't help you with a product recommendation, but affordable scanners
are much slower than photocopiers. Therefore I would suggest that you
somehow get access to a photocopier, scan the book and have the machine
email it to an email account of yours with sufficient disk space.
You'll be saving *tons* of time. Some photocopiers even have devices to
automatically turn the pages of a book, but it's difficult to obtain
access to such a machine. You can also cut the pages (destroy the
binding) and put them into the feeder for much faster scanning.
For the stuff I've scanned so far, I went to the university library and
used one of the B/W photocopiers there at no charge. For example, I've
scanned one entire 400 odd page book turning pages manually in just
over an hour.
The drawback is that most photocopiers don't do grayscale or colour.
Fortunately, most books have only very few pages with grayscale or
colour on them, so it's not an absolute time hog to use a personal
scanner for those. (Since you asked for product names, my personal
scanner is a Canon MP630, which mainly serves the purpose of printing,
but it can also generate high quality scans. Takes ages to make one,
though.)
I can also point you to the following small howto I wrote a while back:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:GrafZahl/How_to_digitalise_works_for_Wik…
HTH,
Alexander