Comrades, I just got an old 80s theory book from an older comrade as a gift and you’re lucky to even find a used print-version anywhere, let alone a pdf version. Even the title of the book itself yields a handful of results at most. So I thought: This shit needs to be digitized.
Thing is, I don’t have it in me to pull this thing apart just to scan it. Scanning via phone is suboptimal in my experience and doesn’t yield the best results to read on a kindle/pdf-reader. I’d be willing to just retype the thing, but at 300 pages that’s quite the workload too.
Is there a good way to do this that’s not super out there, expensive or time consuming?
There are specialised book scanners that have a V shaped platform that you can put the book on then an overhanging camera can scan the page. This prevents the binding from being harmed. However they are very expensive and most likely you wouldn’t want to buy them for just one book.
My university library had these scanners. Maybe you can find an arrangement like this.
On the other hand, if you want to use a flatbed scanner, you can unbind the book, scan the pages individually then get it bound again.