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Taking a razor to my books is emotionally challenging

RavingMac

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My wife and I decided to simplify (declutter) by going digital several years ago. This was one of my primary justifications for buying an iPad and I no longer buy print books if an electronic version is available.

Recently we began the laborious process of sorting through my collection of books and magazines, making essentially three piles:

1) Books and magazines I thought I wanted but have never (and probably will never) read -- donate and/or pitch as appropriate. Replace with electronic version if I ever do end up actually needing/wanting it

2) Books and mags I want and use that an electronic version exist for -- replace and donate dead tree version

3) Books and mags I want and use w/o an acceptable electronic version -- this becomes more problematic. For some there just isn't and maybe never will be an electronic version due to low print volumes or formatting issues (like Atlases).

Some of these last category I had decided to digitize myself and bought a Fujitsu scanner that works very well. So I dutifully began the process this weekend with a cookbook, a song book and a comic book. All went very well and the finally product was great thanks to the scanner and Preview's built-in PDF editing capabilities.
The only problem was nerving myself to take a razor knife to my books to prepare them for the sheet feeder. Suffered some emotional angst over this and the aftermath staring at the pile of loose pages which I dutifully stuffed in the trash bag (after verifying the scan quality).

Total time to process and then edit the resulting PDFs for the three books was a little less than 2 hours.
 
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The only problem was nerving myself to take a razor knife to my books to prepare them for the sheet feeder. Suffered some emotional angst over this and the aftermath staring at the pile of loose pages which I dutifully stuffed in the trash bag (after verifying the scan quality).

You didn't donate the books to a local charity or library or something so others get a chance to read something too?
 
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RavingMac

RavingMac

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You didn't donate the books to a local charity or library or something so others get a chance to read something too?

It would have been difficult to do since I had to disassemble the books to get them to feed through the scanner.

I have donated hundreds of books over the years FWIW but in this case I am trying to get electronic versions of the prime selections from my collection.
I guess I could have tried stapling and/or gluing the pages back together but, being absolutely honest the reason these books aren't available electronically is they don't have wide appeal anyway.
I like them, but apparently not enough other people do to justify an eBook release.
 
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And this is what upsets me. I like having physical copies of books. Publishers could promote sales by providing a digitized copy of the book when you purchase it by either providing a CD/DVD (I'd pay the premium for this) or by allowing a digital download.

It would be like movies that now include a disc for watching the movie and a disc for a "digital version" so that you can watch it on your computer, iPod, or through a server.

I hesitate on purchasing certain digitized copies of books, especially ones that are instructional where I usually do a lot of flipping. I'd personally have a huge heavy Photoshop instructional manual infront of me rather than trying to manipulate one with iBooks or Stanza.
 
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RavingMac

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And this is what upsets me. I like having physical copies of books. Publishers could promote sales by providing a digitized copy of the book when you purchase it by either providing a CD/DVD (I'd pay the premium for this) or by allowing a digital download.

It would be like movies that now include a disc for watching the movie and a disc for a "digital version" so that you can watch it on your computer, iPod, or through a server.

I hesitate on purchasing certain digitized copies of books, especially ones that are instructional where I usually do a lot of flipping. I'd personally have a huge heavy Photoshop instructional manual infront of me rather than trying to manipulate one with iBooks or Stanza.

I like that idea, and I agree there are some books that electronic just doesn't cut it. I am fond of historical Atlases and there is no substitute for the experience of flipping through the actual book in my opinion.

On the other hand, novels, most manuals, and non-picture intensive books in general I would rather have the eBook only. (My daughter is a librarian and she is horrified by this attitude BTW). :)
 
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The best deal as far as that I've seen is that the publisher of the Missing Manual books give you an option to upgrade for $5 and you get electronic versions in a number of formats.

I've taken a razor to my knitting pattern books, and it still torments me every time. LOL
 
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Filed under irony in my library is a S&P book that existed only in electronic format. I actually had to print out the entire book and get it bound. That probably cost me more that if I had been able to get it via hard copy to begin with and then cut & scan it. The ironic part is that a S&P book on CD is useless without electricity, which is a good chunk of what the topic of the book is essentially about.
 
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I like that idea, and I agree there are some books that electronic just doesn't cut it. I am fond of historical Atlases and there is no substitute for the experience of flipping through the actual book in my opinion.

On the other hand, novels, most manuals, and non-picture intensive books in general I would rather have the eBook only. (My daughter is a librarian and she is horrified by this attitude BTW). :)

I think that will be the future. A book store will just be a small room with a huge file server on it. And you swipe the ipad across a scanner. And it'll pay for the e-book from whatever card you want and wifi the book to you. And to browse the book store you just look at a screen to make your purchases. Kind of like ibooks is today. Only in person kinda.
 

robduckyworth


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imagine how heart breaking it would be if your hard drive failed!
 
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RavingMac

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There, I fixed it for you!

Which is why I back up frequently to a Seagate external HD and have D-link DNS-323 with 2 1TB drives setup in RAID 1 . . . of course the same problem exists with hard copies and potential house fires.

EDIT: I should have quoted robduckyworth . . . Oh well, you get the idea. :)
 
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You are definitely doing the right thing but there is a flaw in your logic...

Given enough time, ALL mechanical hard drives WILL fail, but not all houses will burn down!
 
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imagine how heart breaking it would be if your hard drive failed!

Not at all. Important files are kept on a server which duplicates the folders I tell it to across multipl drives and an external drive keeps a back up off site. There would have to be three points of failures or some type of EMP device to completely destroy my data.

At that point, I can worry about telling stories after surviving the nuclear holocaust or whatever life altering event were to cause that EMP blast.
 
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RavingMac

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You are definitely doing the right thing but there is a flaw in your logic...

Given enough time, ALL mechanical hard drives WILL fail, but not all houses will burn down!

Actually all houses will eventually burn . . . the following is from Wikipedia:

Life cycleMain articles: Formation and evolution of the Solar System and Stellar evolution
The Sun was formed about 4.57 billion years ago when a hydrogen molecular cloud collapsed.[85] Solar formation is dated in two ways: the Sun's current main sequence age, determined using computer models of stellar evolution and nucleocosmochronology, is thought to be about 4.57 billion years.[86] This is in close accord with the radiometric date of the oldest Solar System material, at 4.567 billion years ago.[87][88]

The Sun is about halfway through its main-sequence evolution, during which nuclear fusion reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium. Each second, more than four million metric tons of matter are converted into energy within the Sun's core, producing neutrinos and solar radiation. At this rate, the Sun has so far converted around 100 Earth-masses of matter into energy. The Sun will spend a total of approximately 10 billion years as a main sequence star.[89]

The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, in about 5 billion years, it will enter a red giant phase, its outer layers expanding as the hydrogen fuel in the core is consumed and the core contracts and heats up. Helium fusion will begin when the core temperature reaches around 100 million K and will produce carbon, entering the asymptotic giant branch phase.[27]


Life-cycle of the Sun; sizes are not drawn to scale.Earth's fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AU (1.5×1011 m), 250 times the present radius of the Sun.[90] However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions.[90] Even if Earth would escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere would escape into space.
 

robduckyworth


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Glad to see we have regular back ups in place!
 

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