What you say? -Yes or no?
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I have a number of art books that I love the images in but I never crack anymore, but getting good scans of them would involve cutting each page out to allow scanning it flat. There’s no way I know of to get a good scan with the pages attached to the spine–one edge lifts up and off the scanner. Is there any way to scan these book pages without cutting them out? I tried taking photos with a 2-megapixel camera, but the camera results are nowhere near as good as the quality I get from scanning them at 300 DPI and descreening at 175 LPI. -I need to buy a new scanner anyway (as mine is ~5 yrs old, parallel-port and creaky), but I cannot afford another better digital camera. Is there any one particular (consumer-grade) scanner that is particularly good at this?
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In all honesty, I’m not sure you have the right to be scanning images from a published work, do you?
There seem to be several kinds of book scanners on the market, e.g. this one [PDF], and I also remember seeing photographs of wedge-shaped book scanners that can scan half-opened books.
Of course there also is the separate question of copyright.
As a book dealer I have pondered this many times. If I want to sell one of my books there is no copyright problem. I just can’t do it with the conventional scanner.
If you’re thinking about destroying the books to scan them, is the purpose of scanning to post the images in some way? Basically, if you’re going to be putting these images up on the web you’d be breaking copyright, as others have mentioned. Even if the subjects of the images are old, the photographer/publisher holds copyright for the pictures.
If you love them that much, just slice 'em out & frame 'em. For your use = ok; spreading the love around = breaking the law.
Have you tried going to a book binder and asking them to unbind the book then rebind it after you’ve scanned it? I’m not sure if they can do this but I’m pretty sure they can.
Rebinding the book is possible if the pages have sufficiently large gutters and you made clean cuts and the pages are all the same size.
That will cost you a lot of $$$$ however. Presumably the prints are on thick glossy paper.
My scanner, a Canon, has a special lid that opens up and leaves about 1" of clearance - it’s designed to allow scanning of books. Matter of fact, it gives instructions in the manual on how to use this feature to scan from books. I don’t know about the copyright issue, but there are scanners out there that are made to scan from books.
Try calling a bindery that specializes in rare books. They may have a photocopier with a book cradle that can get a good copy of the pages you need without destroying the book in the process. You might also want to call around to any large rare book libraries, or historical libraries–they might have one, too. Then you could scan the copies. I’m assuming, of course, that you understand the copyright implications and this would be fair use.