Q: Least painful book scanning method?

[rebeccmeister]

I currently have a book checked out via interlibrary loan and would like to scan a chapter for personal use because I only have the book for like 3 days.

Technologies I have at my disposal:

-Camera stand (yay!) + some hopefully bright-enough lights

-Smart-o-phone with camera
-Webcam
-Point-n-shoot Canon PowerShot A__ digital camera

Ideally I'd like to generate a pdf that isn't an enormous file size, without having to do a ludicrous amount of manual page cropping or anything. I do have a copy of Acrobat CS5 on this machine, and/or Preview.

What I'm wondering is, what would Jesus do? Smart-o-Phone to the Oogley Drive? Webcam or point-n-shoot to an image folder, then stitch things together?

Probably Smart-o-phone, but if there are advantages to the other tools available, I'd love to hear 'em.

Comments

[moodyduck]

I've done the photographing method but haven't tried creating a pdf. I just flip through the photos in their own folder. With a camera stand and maybe a piece of tape to mark alignment on the desk I would think you could quickly take a bunch of photos that don't need any editing. I've done it without a stand or light and it's usually fine unless the book is very thick/stiffly bound.

[moodyduck]

Used to use a camera but more recently just used my phone because I was at work and that was all I had.

[twoeleven]

Use whichever camera takes the best pictures, which is almost certainly the most recent one. Use the camera stand so that the camera is parallel to the book; it's easy to have them skew and have the text blur out to one side.

For pages that don't have color images, take black and white pictures or convert the pictures to black and white. Black and white PDFs are smaller than color ones*, and are easier to OCR later.

*: I'm pretty sure. It's been a while since I played with them, but it's true of most image formats.