Although I do like to keep the magazines I've purchased over the years, I see no point in keeping paper-based copies of magazines. And Google Books isn't moving fast enough with their scanning project, so I guess I'm going to have to do it myself.
I will need to buy a paper guillotine to cut the spines off of my books and magazines, and I'll need a color scanner with an automatic document feeder (ADF) so I'm not spending days and days just hand-feeding pages into a flatbed scanner.
However some magazines do not follow the A4 / 8.5 x 11 standard, and if I'm going to do this right I want to cover anything up to 11 x 17.
Whoah, did you say 11 x 17 ?? And an ADF??
Suddenly this hobby project becomes very expensive. There is no such thing as an inexpensive (under $500) 11 x 17 scanner with an ADF. In fact, there's no such scanner under $2000.
About the least expensive 11 x 17 color scanner with an ADF appears to be the Kodak i1405 at a mere $2499. Yeouch. So, just how valuable IS that old collection of Omni and Mondo 2000 magazines? Are they worth forking out 2.5 grand to digitize and discard?
Hmm, I think I'm going to have to do some more looking. Under $1000 I suppose I could handle but $2500 is still ridiculously high.
Though, I suppose I could always turn around and resell the scanner to recover some of the expense, after I'm done scanning five years worth of New Scientist magazine into my home computer.
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