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Comment by apryldelancey | Hacker News Reader

I can't help it. I love books and have a huge collection. I used to have a really bad habit of buying something almost weekly but have since recovered to only go through buying spurts every 3-6 months. My dream is a house with a massive built-in bookshelf. Sick? Maybe.

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At one time I had plans for a 2,000 volume library in the basement. Basically book cases on rails that you could stack all to one side or the other, each capable of holding roughly 200 books. Books are really awesome.

These days I digitize them (or buy them pre-digitized if I can get them without DRM). That is because a large portion of the books I buy and keep are nominally "reference" works rather than fiction. The reading experience is certainly different but with screens not horribly so and everything fits on a couple of flash drives so no risk of having my library burn up or get buried in an earthquake.

I'd love to hear about your digitization workflow. I have an enormous backlog of books that would be much easier to read (more portable and available) if they were digitized.

I use a hydraulic paper cutter at work to cut the spine off and then feed them through a Fujitsu ScanSnap. It scans double-sided straight to PDF. It takes about 10 minutes/book to create Hi-res color PDF's. The scanner is pretty fast.

My archival format is this hi-res color PDF (sadly, I like the yellowed color of old pages and like to have that retained when reading on an iPad.) These files are quite large (100 meg or so). Lucky enormous hard disks are cheap.

For daily reading, I send the PDF's through an epub converter that turns them to lower res, B&W epubs and then onto a Kindle Paperwhite.

I used to be bothered by the destruction of the book, but now its almost spiritual. The book must go through the ritual and give up its corporeal form so that it can live forever in my digital Valhalla.

I like it. Thanks for sharing, and wish I had access to that setup. I spent years trawling through used bookstores accumulating tons of books. Starting to divest them now, though. Electronic is just so much more compact and easier...

Thanks for the information. I wish I could get over my hangup about destroying books, because that sounds like a very reasonable workflow otherwise.

I started using 1dollarscan.com. They have a "platinum" program that for $100/month[1] you can scan 100 "sets" (each set is 100 pages, so a total of 10,000 pages) with the basic enrichments (OCR, tuning to particular devices). On some volumes I ponied up for the color and/or 600dpi options.

Did that for about 6 months and processed a bit more than 60,000 pages. I bought a nice guillotine cutter off Amazon and a ScanSnap 1500 scanner [3]. For a lot of paperback references I could cut the spine off, drop it into the scanner, and it takes less than minute to scan the entire book, both sides of the page. I also scanned a several years of Scientific American, Nature: Materials, and other magazines I've kept for reference. Yes it "destroys" the book, generally though I'm ok with that. If I really want something in book form I'll buy two copies, scan one and keep the other. For reference material it is much more helpful to have things digitized. I've been working on a home grown data management application which catalogs and cross references information from the books. The whole library is less than a terabyte at the moment.

[1] 1dollarscan platinum membership -- http://1dollarscan.com/membership.php

[2] Stack S12 guillotine cutter -- http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000YI5P76/

[3] ScanSnap 1500 scanner (current model iX500) -- http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scan...

Not OP, but I digitized several hundred books when I went all digital. 1dollarscan.com if I could live with destructive scanning (sliced, scanned, recycled afterwards), DIY cradle scanning if the book had some value (http://www.diybookscanner.org/).

My entire library is archived in AWS' Glacier, and costs me ~$1.50/month to store.

How do you read your books?

I was thinking getting an iPad so that the resolution is tolerable vs actual books.

Kindle app for kindle books, everything else is a PDF (generic PDF viewer). I have yet to find a quality ebook tablet that handles PDFs :/

I have a 30K collection of ebooks, 90% PDF's. Use BRISS[1] to crop to optimize them for the screen space on my 1080p Nook HD+ (jailbroken running CM with "PDF Reader" by Lieo Hi-Dev).

Everyone's definition of "quality" varies, but this has worked well for me for the past 2-odd years; undoubtedly there are better tablets, but the Nook HD+ struck a cost/benefit sweet spot for me. If my Nook HD+ broke tomorrow I'd probably replace it with a 1080p Lenovo Tab2 A10 tablet for 180USD.

[1] http://briss.sourceforge.net/

Thank you so much. I hadn't kept up with tablets and I didn't think a "retina"-like screen was possible to have under $400. I think I'll get that instead of paper books for now.

Sony Digital Paper[1] looks good, but it's $800.

[1] http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solu...

I do the same thing! If there's a book I want to keep, I scan it with my DIY bookscanner and toss the book away.

I, too, used to dream of having a big home library. Now I dream of a home with almost nothing in it. (If it weren't for music scores, which I use at the piano, there wouldn't be any books in the house other than what I'm currently reading and hasn't been scanned yet.)

I felt sick hearing that a book has been tossed away.

Agreed; your local library happily accepts donations (assuming you haven't cut the spine off).

The local library doesn't really like donations. Most get tossed. A separate charity takes them, tosses most, and conducts sales to raise money for the library with what's left.

But the fact is, if I'm retaining a copy of the book (with my scan), I can't give the book away. I still have it. That would be stealing. It is really disheartening to see people here on Hacker News who believe that intellectual property should be stolen and/or has no value. That's disturbing.

Me too, I can't do it!

When I was a kid my allowance started at $0.50 and a paperback was $3-$4. So I could only buy a book every 6-8 weeks. For a little bit the $10 gift certificates to book stores I would get for my birthday dwarfed anything I could manage myself. My allowance went up, but it wasn't until I got a job that books got cheap enough that I could buy them whenever I wanted.

I now have a library in my house (not builtin, but 84" shelves nearly wall-to-wall. It's nice :)

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