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Over the years I have amassed and thoroughly enjoy my 1000 cookbooks on my shelves.  Recently I have decided only to buy digital cookbooks as a new way of storing content.   We are moving to a new house and I am struggling to think where to put my books.  Has anyone scanned or used a scanning service.   What do you do with your excessive book collections?

I'm speaking more as a computer engineer than a cook here.

Digitizing a printed volume is an expensive process. For a "common" volume (like a modern cookbook), it's also an entirely destructive process -- the book will no longer exist, once done. During manufacturing, book's pages are neatened up at the edges using a Guillotine-like mechanism. The same sort of mechanism is used to free pages from their bindings to be digitized. It's a destructive process. It ceases to be a book. It's simply unbound leafs of paper. Then the leafs of papper are scanned. You don't necesarilly have the text of the recipes, you might only have 'photos' of the pages. It's a complex process.

I hate to say this, because I know it's not what you want to hear, but for those volumes available in digital form, it would be far cheaper to simply repurchase them, than to have them scanned.

Give them to charity so that others less fortunate can benefit and buy digital copies of your favourites i.e. the books you actually use and not the others, clogging up the house and never referred to ... I speak from experience!

I'm trying to operate a one in, one out policy but it's hard. Christmas will no doubt bring a couple of new books so the local charity shops will be happy in January if I can bring myself to decide who's for the chop.

 Thank you all for your input.  I think you have all confirmed my thoughts on the 'problem'.  

I was familiar with how professional scanning services work and wouldn't want to 'murder' books in that way but I have a home scanner which is effective and wondered about the digital side of storage.   (It will take 1 to 2 hours per book to scan but it can be a long project) 

My husband  has been trying t to get me to operate a one in one out book policy for years, hence the 1000 cookbooks!

idea, a cookbook coffee table - genius

If you are prepared to take up the scanning challege, that's a different story. But be aware that it is easy to get bogged down. I'm stalled at 2/3rds the way through scanning an extensive collection of family photographic negatives.

Portable backup drives are very compact and affoardable at this point. So you really don't need to be too concerned about storage or the space it will take up. I have a pair. I keep one at home and one off-site to protect against disaster (house fire, earthquake etc). I periodically synchronize them and then one goes off-site again. BTW, the only thing that makes it a "Backup" drive versus any other harddrive, is that it comes with backup management software. Here is one example of a portable backup drive: Seagate Backup Plus 5TB Portable 

I did a quick calculation, and I estimate that all 1000 volumes of your collection could be stored as scans in about 1.5 TB max; likely far less than that.

There may be a better option than scanning the books on a desktop scanner. Putting a bound book in a scanner, you are going to get serious distortion near the binding as the page leaves the glass, which is the focus point of the scanner. Anything that is not flat against the glass, be it text or photo, is going to be distorted and likely out of focus. There's another way. Use your cell phone to photograph the pages, the distrortion will be far-less severe. I do this all the time for myself and within the family. Snapshotting the recipe before going to the store is easier than making a shopping list. And on occasion I've shared a recipe in one of my books with a family member.

Whether you scan them or photograph the pages, from there, you have 2 choices. You can simply save the photos or scans as is, probably in folders by cookbook. With EYB as your index, this is probably fine. For books that aren't in EYB, you might want to convert the photos back to text. For this you need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. I'm not up on the state-of-the-art there. But it's very widely used, so it shouldn't be expensive (If you do online banking, online check depositing uses this tech). I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is OCR software specifcally designed for books. Though complex layout (asides, multiple columns, gratuitiously ornate fonts, etc.) might gum up the works a bit. By converting them back to text, you mke them searchable.

If you decide to use your cell phone (or any other) camera, ideally you want to light the book from either side, and ideally at 45º angles (think a V with the book at the bottom and the lights at the tops). At the very least, you want the light to the side, not above, so you aren't casting your own and the camera's shadow on the work.

And one more thing, which is off topic, but as you let volumes go, do due a search on the title. You might find you have a hard to find title, which is worth some money; simply search Amazon to check prices.

Good luck!

Thanks for your update.  I have recently bought a czur scanner which is like an overhead camera arm, it accommodates the fold in an open book and flattens it out.  One option seems to be to save as a searchable PDF and yes definitely was thinking of using it in conjunction with EYB.  it's early days but I think it might do the trick and then to think about storage a d a second backup is a must. 

The hardware/app you've found sounds perfect. Searchable PDF is exactly what you want -- like buying the digital edition. It sounds like you have things very well in hand at this point. I watch the forums, so just post if you run into difficulties. I'll help as I can.

Hi SueJB,

My experience with scanning to PDF is that the PDFs come out very heavy.  However, it is possible to get software that will trim the bloat created during scanning. On my Mac computer, I use a small program called Lightweight PDF.  It works well for most of my needs.  If I were planning to scan a library, I would likely invest in more robust program.

As simple time saving, you might want to start with those books that do not have epubs available.  That way, if you bog down, you haven't spent time scanning something that you could have bought. 

I also keep a specific cookbook list on Amazon, and check weekly to see if any of my wants are on sale as epubs.  Much as I love paper books, I just don't have the space anymore.

Zephy

You say you throughly enjoy your 1000 cookbooks.  Don't let others opinions steal your joy!  Keep them all as long as you enjoy them.  I'm sure there are people in your life who would treasure them when you decide to let some go!  It's your life! It's your joy!  Do it the way you enjoy it!  Do you!

I am having good luck with the new type of overhead scanners.  Someone above mentioned the Czur scanner.  I am using the iCODIS X9 which looks very similar.  I can go through a book pretty quick, and it comes with software that does two very important things.  One is it will account for the curvature of the pages in a book, and the other is it will do the best job it can to convert the scanned image to actual text using OCR technology.  As the previous poster mentioned, that will make the resulting PDF or Word document searchable, but it will also allow you to cut and paste text from the image into a recipe manager like Paprika.  It isn't perfect though - it particularly struggles with fractions in recipes - but it is pretty good.  It also comes with a button that you keep right next to the overhead scanner so you rapidly snap pictures without going back and forth to the computer.  It is still a big investment of time (particularly if you want to fix all of the OCR errors to cut-and-paste each recipe into a recipe manager), but  I am doing for some of my cookbooks that aren't available in a digital format.

Yes Bob Mack it was me who has the czur and it seems very similar to your description of your scanner so am looking forward to playing around with it.