REPLAY-RPF0575-How__Why_I_Scanned_My_Entire_Library_So_I_Can_Carry_It_With_Me_On_The_Road
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00:00:14.760 | ♪ These are a few of my favorite things ♪
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00:00:27.360 | [intro]
00:00:30.920 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:33.960 | skills, insight and encouragement you need to lead a rich and meaningful life now, while
00:00:38.040 | building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.
00:00:40.940 | My name is Joshua, I am your host, and today, we answer a listener question and the listener
00:00:44.480 | writes in and says, "Joshua, good evening.
00:00:46.280 | I've been listening for a while, and I remember that during one episode, you briefly went
00:00:49.320 | into how you were scanning all of your books to PDF.
00:00:51.940 | I was wondering, will you please elaborate some more on that for me?
00:00:54.680 | Did you have a high-end duplex scanner or software specially made for assembling the
00:00:59.140 | multiple scans of the pages of the books?
00:01:01.360 | Or did you brute force it for all of your books with simply a plate glass scanner?
00:01:05.520 | The process of separating the bindings, and most of all, scanning each individual page,
00:01:10.200 | seems very cumbersome with my run-of-the-mill HP scanner/printer combo.
00:01:13.920 | I'm curious because one of my hobbies is playing chess, and I'm usually unable to
00:01:18.080 | resist the unspoken promise of rapid chess improvement if I buy just one more chess book.
00:01:23.820 | My wife would like me to consolidate the plethora of chess knowledge on my bookshelves, but
00:01:28.880 | I'm loathe to throw away some of the books before I have yet had the chance to study
00:01:32.240 | them, even if I admit that it's likely I never will get to all of them.
00:01:36.360 | Thank you, Joshua.
00:01:37.360 | Keep up the good work."
00:01:38.360 | It's a good question, and I have personal experience and personal thoughts on this that
00:01:42.720 | I think will be useful for you today.
00:01:45.080 | First, a short sales pitch on reading.
00:01:48.760 | I have met only a handful of wealthy people who were not readers, and even that handful
00:01:54.960 | of wealthy people who were not readers and yet had managed to become wealthy, my analysis
00:02:01.200 | is that is a deficiency, and they were successful in spite of that personal shortcoming and
00:02:07.360 | that personal deficiency, not because of it.
00:02:10.640 | I have never met someone who proudly proclaims, "I'm just not a reader," who I've generally
00:02:17.240 | looked at and said, "Well, I just want to be just like them."
00:02:21.960 | Generally, the people who most loudly proclaim such statements frequently, their lives reflect
00:02:28.000 | the fact that they are not readers and that they don't have the opportunity to gain the
00:02:32.560 | benefit of the wisdom of the ages.
00:02:35.160 | Now that's not universally true.
00:02:36.880 | There have been people who have been successful that I've come in contact with or observed
00:02:42.040 | that aren't readers, but at least usually when they say, "I'm not a reader," they've
00:02:46.280 | often said so with a note of apology, recognizing that they probably would get better results
00:02:52.720 | if they were a reader.
00:02:54.760 | There is no more efficient mechanism for the acquisition of knowledge and information than
00:03:00.200 | reading.
00:03:02.560 | Listening doesn't do it.
00:03:04.640 | Watching videos doesn't do it.
00:03:06.040 | Sitting in classes doesn't do it.
00:03:08.480 | Talking to people and gaining just from your own life experience doesn't do it.
00:03:12.000 | Now all of those things are important.
00:03:13.580 | Audio is helpful.
00:03:14.580 | Video is useful.
00:03:15.880 | Videos are wonderful and your own personal experience is crucial, but reading should
00:03:22.200 | be the foundation of all of our educational platforms.
00:03:25.840 | Unfortunately, in our modern age, too many of us have the thought that education is something
00:03:31.400 | that happens to us.
00:03:32.480 | We go to school and we get our education instead of becoming learners intent and focused on
00:03:39.960 | constant self-education.
00:03:42.480 | Reading is very efficient because you can change the pace of reading as appropriate
00:03:47.720 | to the content.
00:03:49.760 | Some books need about 10 minutes.
00:03:53.600 | Some books need 10 minutes per page or more.
00:03:57.680 | It's only with the technology of reading that you can apply the appropriate pace and tempo
00:04:03.180 | to your studies.
00:04:06.020 | Reading is a skill that has to be developed and learned, but I'm personally convinced
00:04:10.060 | that the very first of your investment dollars should be invested into books and your time
00:04:18.200 | should be invested into books.
00:04:19.560 | They're one of the best investments.
00:04:21.200 | Books are uniquely rich in content, especially the good books, the best books, the great
00:04:29.520 | books.
00:04:31.040 | Books are works of, are labors, labors of love usually by their author.
00:04:38.440 | It takes so much time for an author to sit down and consider their thoughts and develop
00:04:42.520 | those thoughts and put them into a book that people don't generally do it casually.
00:04:47.880 | Only a handful of books are written quickly and published immediately.
00:04:51.120 | Rather, an author will generally labor and labor and labor for hundreds or thousands
00:04:56.240 | of hours over their content.
00:04:58.120 | And in preparation for their content, they will usually bring a lifetime of study or
00:05:02.180 | at least years of study, years of interest, many interviews, much thinking and organization
00:05:08.920 | to their topic.
00:05:09.920 | They'll bring that and put it into a book.
00:05:12.440 | And they'll usually draw on the work, the collected works of others throughout history
00:05:15.920 | who've done the same thing.
00:05:17.520 | So when you read a good book, you're usually reading the output of dozens of great focused
00:05:23.680 | minds applied to a specific problem.
00:05:25.880 | And so there's a good chance that you'll get a good result.
00:05:29.560 | Not all books are great, but you can spot the great ones quickly and spot the not great
00:05:34.400 | ones quickly and adjust your time appropriately.
00:05:39.240 | So books are a wonderful investment, but they do come with a problem.
00:05:42.000 | And that problem is how do you store them?
00:05:44.960 | Now my listener's wife would like him to consolidate some of the books on his bookshelves.
00:05:49.520 | And my wife feels exactly the same way.
00:05:51.800 | My wife is a reader, but she very much, unlike me, she very much would ascribe to the Marie
00:05:56.920 | Kondo theory of books that once you have read it, it's become a part of you and there's
00:06:00.720 | no reason to keep it around any longer.
00:06:02.880 | I appreciate that, but that's not been my experience.
00:06:07.120 | And in her opinion, books look like clutter.
00:06:10.000 | And so she doesn't like to see clutter in the house.
00:06:12.000 | She doesn't want to have a bunch of bookshelves in the house.
00:06:14.280 | Well that's a little bit at odds with my own decorating intention where I would be happy
00:06:19.880 | to live in a house that was stacked with nothing but bookshelves.
00:06:24.680 | I do prefer them to be on the bookshelves.
00:06:26.480 | I'm not quite like the Clive Cussler character, I think it was St. Julian Perlmutter, who
00:06:32.880 | was an elderly eccentric man who lived in a house where there wasn't any surface left
00:06:38.160 | because every bookshelf was full and there was a stack on every floor.
00:06:41.800 | I like my books to be neat, but I do like to have them around.
00:06:46.600 | And that performs a challenge because it's challenging to figure out where do you store
00:06:50.000 | them?
00:06:51.000 | Where do you keep them?
00:06:52.000 | Books are best displayed on a bookshelf.
00:06:53.520 | If they're going to actually be useful, they're best displayed on a bookshelf.
00:06:57.080 | And I affirm that from personal experience.
00:06:58.640 | I've tried other methods of sorting and maintaining books.
00:07:02.320 | In the past when we moved from a larger house into a smaller apartment, one of the problems
00:07:06.600 | was what do I do with all my books?
00:07:08.540 | And so my plan at that point in time was I went from using bookshelves to using some
00:07:13.600 | of those sturdy industrial shelves that you can buy that are two feet by four feet in
00:07:17.680 | size and I put large plastic bins on those shelves and I put all my books in the bins.
00:07:22.400 | I went through and I inventory the titles and authors of the books and I made an inventory
00:07:26.800 | list so I would know which bin to access when I needed a certain book.
00:07:31.840 | And I thought that that would work well.
00:07:33.780 | It did not work.
00:07:34.860 | Books belong on bookshelves.
00:07:35.860 | So I tell you that first and foremost.
00:07:38.260 | But bookshelves require time, it's space and there's a financial cost to maintaining those
00:07:42.960 | bookshelves.
00:07:43.960 | You have to have them.
00:07:45.240 | So either it's the visual space needed or the financial investment of renting a larger
00:07:50.480 | apartment, buying a larger house, etc.
00:07:53.880 | So it's been a constant question that I have wrestled with.
00:07:58.360 | I like the idea of having a personal library and in the future I want to make sure that
00:08:04.240 | our house always has a large personal library.
00:08:07.400 | To me that's important.
00:08:08.960 | But recently in preparation for traveling I decided that this time I would go ahead
00:08:13.840 | and try digitizing my books.
00:08:17.000 | And I learned a lot for that.
00:08:18.880 | By the way I should also address one of the questions that you might have about what about
00:08:24.720 | the use of a library.
00:08:27.240 | I personally like to use libraries.
00:08:29.400 | The places I like to go to, libraries, I enjoy being in libraries.
00:08:33.120 | And I love libraries especially for the purpose of scanning a topic.
00:08:37.920 | Generally since the time I was, as long as I can remember, if I go to the library I'll
00:08:42.680 | usually walk out with anywhere from 30 to 50 books or more.
00:08:47.560 | I have always maintained a maximum borrowing on various library cards that I've ever had.
00:08:53.480 | I don't read all of them but I absorb a decent amount of what I'm interested in those books.
00:09:00.080 | And so there's no better tool than a good library for being able to scan a topic that
00:09:06.120 | you have interest in and gain a sense of that topic.
00:09:13.640 | This would be referred to if you were studying how to read a book.
00:09:19.960 | The classic text on how to be a better reader.
00:09:23.000 | One of the terms that Mortimer Adler gave me, the author of that particular text, one
00:09:27.820 | of the terms that he gave was called syntopical reading.
00:09:31.680 | And that's where you survey a particular subject.
00:09:34.720 | So if you're studying a particular issue, perhaps it's gardening in general or a specific
00:09:39.240 | type of gardening or perhaps you're studying a philosophical question.
00:09:43.600 | One of the things that you need to do is you need to search out all of the literature that's
00:09:48.640 | been produced on that subject and then you need to scan it and read it syntopically so
00:09:53.520 | that you can understand what the key questions are.
00:09:56.360 | And then you go back and you identify the key texts that you need to really study.
00:10:01.760 | But I've always found that's easy to do with a library.
00:10:03.780 | You can go to a library, you can pick a topic and you can just grab 30 books off the shelves,
00:10:09.240 | take them home and browse through them over the course of a week or so.
00:10:12.480 | And you'll quickly understand the basic outlines of a particular topic.
00:10:16.040 | So that's what I like to use for libraries.
00:10:18.040 | The challenge for me is books that I actually want to read or that I actually read, I usually
00:10:22.200 | want to interact with those books.
00:10:24.640 | For me, interacting with the book through the use of marginalia, the underlining, the
00:10:31.960 | highlighting, the questions that I write, that's important to me because it helps me
00:10:36.580 | to interact with the author, it helps me to pay attention when I read and it helps me
00:10:41.280 | to note my own thoughts and questions.
00:10:44.540 | So my own personal systems of marginalia are relatively simple.
00:10:48.860 | But I just have a goal that I want to make the book actually mine.
00:10:53.360 | So I highlight with liberality, I underline without feeling bad about it, I mark questions,
00:10:59.600 | I circle, I try to interact with the author, I write my own thoughts or questions as I'm
00:11:06.600 | reading so that I can see if the author's going to answer them as I continue on.
00:11:10.920 | I have little symbols that I use for an action point.
00:11:14.040 | So I'll put a little check mark if there's something that I need to do an action point.
00:11:17.520 | I keep at the front of the book a list of to-do items, of things that I need to change
00:11:21.980 | or things that I want to do or things that I want to look at based upon what I read in
00:11:25.400 | the book.
00:11:26.400 | And so by the time I'm done reading a book, it's pretty well destroyed for the use of
00:11:29.800 | somebody else.
00:11:31.400 | But I find that that helps me to get the most out of my book.
00:11:34.960 | And then based upon my own system of marginalia, once I've read the book, I don't need to
00:11:40.040 | read it again.
00:11:41.040 | If I ever need to come back to that book, I can usually remember what's in it, I can
00:11:45.400 | remember what I read, and I can come back and I can quickly look at my highlights or
00:11:49.040 | my underlines or the major questions or my summary of it, and I can understand if the
00:11:54.360 | book was, well, I can understand what was there.
00:11:58.680 | And so I never need to read a book twice.
00:12:00.880 | But I want to keep that system of marginalia.
00:12:03.960 | And that's been a challenge for me because in the past I've gone through various phases
00:12:07.440 | of decluttering.
00:12:09.200 | About five years ago, I was decluttering books because it just seems like most of my life
00:12:14.440 | I wind up with these boxes of books.
00:12:16.680 | And most of them I've read, a lot of them I haven't, and they just accumulate and accumulate
00:12:21.600 | and accumulate.
00:12:22.600 | And so I just decided, okay, that's it, I'm going to get rid of some.
00:12:26.200 | But about five years ago, I got rid of, I think I would say probably 500, 800 books,
00:12:32.640 | something like that.
00:12:33.760 | And I had sorted them carefully and I kept the most important ones, but I went ahead
00:12:36.800 | and I was hardcore and I got rid of lots of them.
00:12:40.000 | But then I would regret that because there was one idea and I remembered what the book
00:12:43.760 | was and I went looking for it, I got rid of it.
00:12:46.040 | Because it wasn't a great book, but I had this one particular idea.
00:12:49.760 | So this time in preparation for traveling, I decided to try scanning.
00:12:53.640 | And I thought I would really, I would try it.
00:12:58.880 | And I had listened to my friend Jake DeSilis' discussion on this topic on his podcast, The
00:13:03.400 | Voluntary Life.
00:13:04.400 | Now, Jake is an entrepreneur, he is an early retirement writer, and he and his wife have
00:13:11.400 | been living a location-independent lifestyle for the last few years.
00:13:15.720 | But as a reader himself, he wrestled with this question.
00:13:19.240 | And what he wound up doing was scanning all of his library so that he could carry it with
00:13:24.520 | him in his computer and in his various digital devices.
00:13:28.560 | After hearing his system, I decided to do the same thing.
00:13:32.680 | And so I decided to go ahead and scan my books and keep them with me as scanned copies of
00:13:38.560 | books.
00:13:40.320 | Before I go to the exact system of what I did and what I recommend for you, I should
00:13:43.640 | also touch on the question of digital books versus paper books.
00:13:47.640 | The current, in today's world, we're grateful of course that there are huge numbers of digital
00:13:53.120 | books available.
00:13:54.880 | And digital books are superior in terms of a native digital format, something that's
00:13:59.820 | published in an EPUB or a Kindle format, or some native e-book format that works with
00:14:08.520 | your e-book reader, whether that's a reader that you're using on your computer or on a
00:14:13.240 | handheld device of some kind.
00:14:15.840 | A native digital book is superior for your reading experience.
00:14:19.680 | The problem with relying exclusively or primarily on digital books that are in e-book formats
00:14:26.680 | is, at least for the type of non-fiction reading that I engage in, that limits you to new books.
00:14:34.360 | Very few publishers are going back to a book that was published in 1981 that sold 10,000
00:14:39.360 | copies and saying, "Let's issue this in an e-book format."
00:14:42.920 | So first of all, the major problem with digital books is you only get new books and books
00:14:46.720 | that are larger.
00:14:48.600 | Whereas paper books, there are millions and millions of them out there.
00:14:52.480 | And with paper books, you can actually usually get a better deal with the used book marketplaces,
00:14:57.920 | whether that's on the large sites like Amazon or on the various other sites.
00:15:03.200 | You can go and buy a book for the shipping cost.
00:15:06.320 | It's a penny plus the shipping cost, most books, $3.49, $4, $8, et cetera.
00:15:10.960 | I'll buy books all day long for $4 a piece just to look at them when they're related
00:15:16.040 | to a topic.
00:15:17.040 | But that means you accumulate a lot of paper books.
00:15:19.080 | The other problem with digital books that I have is that they are generally going to
00:15:23.760 | have some system of digital rights management associated with them.
00:15:27.800 | And the digital rights management systems limit you to an exclusive platform for those
00:15:34.720 | books to work, and they limit your ownership of it.
00:15:38.400 | Now I'm conflicted on this.
00:15:40.160 | I'm not a DRM-free purist like some people are.
00:15:44.220 | But just as a practical matter, I hate to be stuck in the DRM system.
00:15:49.000 | A simple example, let's take on buying Kindle books.
00:15:52.760 | Let's say that you go to Amazon and you buy Kindle books on Amazon.
00:15:56.400 | Amazon has a wonderful system to connect you with those Kindle books.
00:16:02.120 | And the Kindle book marketplace is huge.
00:16:04.040 | You can get so many great books there.
00:16:06.120 | But the problem is you can't integrate those Kindle books with the books that you buy for
00:16:10.760 | your Nook.
00:16:12.360 | And the other problem is in order to maintain those Kindle books, you have to maintain the
00:16:17.200 | same Amazon account.
00:16:19.200 | I'm a little bit concerned about maintaining one in-place record of all of the books that
00:16:25.360 | I buy and that I read with one Amazon account over the period of years.
00:16:29.080 | I think that you should swap out your Amazon accounts at least every couple of years.
00:16:33.520 | You should set up a new one with a new name and a new identity and a new location so that
00:16:38.160 | those aren't all connected in one particular record.
00:16:40.680 | And then also as technology changes, you want to keep those from one thing to another.
00:16:46.240 | So that's hard to do with the DRM of Amazon.
00:16:49.880 | I also don't like the way that all the data is collected with digital book readings.
00:16:53.880 | So Amazon, again, as an example, has fairly...
00:16:58.120 | You don't have the same privacy of reading a Kindle book as you do with reading a paper
00:17:03.960 | book.
00:17:04.960 | Kindle knows exactly how far you've read.
00:17:06.200 | They know exactly how fast you've read.
00:17:10.200 | They know what you're reading, exactly what you're reading, exactly what you're underlining.
00:17:14.640 | If you're taking any notes in those, which is, of course, difficult to do.
00:17:18.320 | But if you do take any notes in your digital book, know that in your Amazon system, which
00:17:22.320 | means that some of your most personal thoughts and your most personal insights and the personal
00:17:27.360 | things that you're researching are now available and categorized in a database that is exposed
00:17:34.480 | to the exploits of somebody who may be looking to find that information out.
00:17:38.080 | Now, of course, for the most part, that's not that big of a risk, but there's a decent
00:17:42.800 | chance that at some point in time, somebody might want to gain access to that.
00:17:48.120 | Now, you can change some of those settings.
00:17:49.720 | You can turn them from public to private.
00:17:51.200 | You can turn off some of the data collection.
00:17:53.400 | But digital books just don't give the same degree of privacy.
00:17:55.680 | And I'd be pretty uncomfortable with any creation of all of the things that I read.
00:18:03.340 | Because without context, the particular interests that I have of reading about to various people
00:18:10.960 | might or might not look like something that they should be concerned about.
00:18:17.440 | Context is important.
00:18:18.440 | So, I don't care so much for digital books.
00:18:21.040 | I don't love some of the modern DRM practices that are foisted upon us by all of the major,
00:18:29.840 | well, most of the major book publishers.
00:18:33.680 | I do have some solutions to that.
00:18:35.000 | I still buy digital books, but I have some solutions to improve that.
00:18:38.840 | So, first, let me talk about the paper books, and then let's talk about digital books at
00:18:42.400 | the end.
00:18:43.400 | So, here's what I have done, and what I have had.
00:18:45.520 | It's the best system that I have come up with.
00:18:47.740 | First of all, in order to scan the books, I have engaged in, I guess, for lack of a
00:18:55.480 | better term, it's called destructive scanning, which means that I physically destroy the
00:18:58.960 | book for the purpose of scanning it.
00:19:01.880 | That means that I cut the spine off, and I separate the papers out so that I can run
00:19:07.020 | it through a scanner.
00:19:09.160 | The way that I do that, I've done this a few different ways, is first, I've done some books
00:19:13.200 | manually.
00:19:14.200 | If you just sit down with a book and you rip off, if it's a hard cover, you just rip off
00:19:18.080 | the hard cover, and you can separate the pages one by one.
00:19:21.320 | You can pull off a dozen pages and slice off the ends.
00:19:24.760 | You can do it manually.
00:19:25.760 | I've done that with a few dozen books.
00:19:27.940 | You can do this to some degree with a standard office paper cutter, but in my experience,
00:19:32.880 | I'd rather do with scissors than that standard office paper cutter.
00:19:36.120 | But if you have anything more than, say, a couple dozen books that you intend to do this
00:19:39.000 | to at a time, you definitely don't want to do this manually.
00:19:42.340 | What you want to do is you want to get a guillotine paper cutter, and you want to go towards one
00:19:47.840 | of the more commercial ones.
00:19:49.480 | So, the one that I have used, that I borrowed from somebody, was a fairly, it wasn't a high-end
00:19:57.740 | commercial one, but it was just a common desk-type one that could do a couple hundred pages.
00:20:03.780 | With most books, I could put in most books, most paperbacks, most hardback books, except
00:20:08.380 | for the very thickest of my textbooks, which I scanned all my textbooks as well.
00:20:12.860 | Then you can just slide them in there, and you crank the little wheel down, and you press
00:20:18.420 | the guillotine lever, and you slice off the spine.
00:20:22.660 | And that works really, really well.
00:20:24.500 | I used to work in a print shop, and we had a big, giant one that could do 500 pages or
00:20:28.740 | 1,000 pages at a time.
00:20:30.180 | That's what you use when you, after you do a printing, then you come and you do the trimming,
00:20:34.060 | and that's the kind of thing you use for that.
00:20:35.620 | Well, you can get a home version of that for your home.
00:20:40.300 | If you don't have one of those, you've got to get that.
00:20:42.580 | So plan on that in terms of your costs.
00:20:44.500 | In my case, I was able to borrow one, so I don't still own it, but I can have access
00:20:48.980 | to it anytime I want to.
00:20:50.260 | So you have to cut up and destroy the books.
00:20:52.260 | I believe there are services that will do that for you.
00:20:54.820 | I believe you can ship the books off, and I would recommend that you consider it, because
00:20:59.260 | it's very time intensive.
00:21:00.620 | If you can look at a service, and they charge you a modest price, a couple bucks a book,
00:21:05.780 | something like that, it's probably worth it to go ahead and ship the books off and have
00:21:09.100 | somebody with commercial equipment do the destruction of the book and then scan it for
00:21:13.900 | you.
00:21:14.900 | What I chose to do was I chose to purchase a scanner that's called a ScanSnap ix500.
00:21:19.300 | At the time that I was doing this research, and it was the basic standard out there for
00:21:24.100 | a high-end home scanner.
00:21:27.000 | It's a duplex scanner, which means that you can put a stack of pages, you can put 100
00:21:32.140 | pages from the book on the scanner, and it'll feed it through automatically, pulling off
00:21:36.140 | the bottom, and it'll automatically scan both sides of the book.
00:21:41.140 | My version of the ix500 scans at about 30 pages a minute, so that can make pretty quick
00:21:46.340 | work of a book.
00:21:49.320 | You do have to sit there and feed it, but it'll scan 30 pages a minute automatically,
00:21:53.660 | and it'll create a PDF for you.
00:21:55.540 | If you've done a good job with your cutting of the book to eliminate binding, to eliminate
00:22:00.100 | adhesives, and to eliminate double pages, it's fairly trouble-free.
00:22:04.380 | You learn over time that you need to cut off more than you'd like to, because you want
00:22:07.380 | to make sure there's no binding or glue residue that's holding pages together, because that
00:22:10.580 | just messes up all the scans.
00:22:12.620 | But it's fairly trouble-free, and so you can run it through with the scanner.
00:22:16.620 | In hindsight, given the fact that if I didn't own or have access to the loan of a guillotine
00:22:24.380 | paper cutter, I might consider buying one of the more expensive scanners that is purpose-designed
00:22:31.460 | for scanning books.
00:22:33.980 | So the ScanSnap is about $450, $500 for the scanner.
00:22:40.000 | If you can increase your price of the scanner up to about $750, $800, you can get a scanner
00:22:47.340 | that sits on the paper, and as you flip the pages of a book, it'll automatically take
00:22:52.260 | a snapshot of the book and scan it.
00:22:57.020 | For the reviews that I looked at, that does a pretty good job.
00:22:59.820 | Now obviously, financially, that's a pretty tough nut to swallow.
00:23:03.420 | When I was searching, I didn't find many on the used market.
00:23:05.820 | I would imagine you could buy one of those, digitize your library, and sell it for a decent
00:23:09.820 | price, but I don't know those numbers.
00:23:12.500 | And because that particular type of scanner is purpose-focused on books, it didn't have
00:23:16.980 | as much utility as I felt having the ScanSnap Duplex IX500 would be, because the IX500 is
00:23:25.700 | something that you can use and keep on hand constantly for digitizing your life.
00:23:30.820 | It's so simple, it can take a stack of mixed paper, receipts, invoices, documents for your
00:23:38.860 | home, etc.
00:23:40.060 | And so since you can scan just about anything that'll slide through the scanning bed, it
00:23:46.620 | has a much greater versatility.
00:23:48.580 | And so you have to factor that in.
00:23:50.060 | You're trying to buy these books cheap and avoid from buying them in the future because
00:23:52.940 | you're trying to create this archive, but still, if you've got to buy a scanner, you've
00:23:56.300 | got to factor that into your pricing.
00:24:00.100 | Because I have so much versatility continuing from the ScanSnap, I feel good about that
00:24:04.500 | decision.
00:24:05.500 | I use it a lot, and I like the fact that I can continue to digitize things going forward
00:24:10.660 | because that will continually keep for me a lower footprint.
00:24:17.100 | I'll need less physical space because I have more things digitally archived than physically
00:24:22.340 | archived.
00:24:23.340 | So I really like that.
00:24:24.340 | So you need to cut the books up, you need a good paper cutter that can do a couple hundred
00:24:27.140 | pages at once, and a scanner.
00:24:30.300 | Again, look for those, see if you can sell them out, sell them in the future.
00:24:37.300 | What ScanSnap creates for you is a PDF.
00:24:39.700 | And that PDF is a pretty good quality.
00:24:42.180 | You can scan in black and white, which is really nice because it cleans up even some
00:24:45.660 | of the old yellowed pages in your older books.
00:24:49.480 | Or you can scan in color if that's important to you.
00:24:52.040 | And the scans are pretty high quality, which means that you could apply to the process
00:24:57.340 | an optical character recognition program, OCR, which would in a sense digitize the text
00:25:04.180 | on the page.
00:25:05.180 | I don't bother with that because I haven't seen the need for it, and I don't need all
00:25:08.580 | those files.
00:25:09.580 | I just keep the PDFs, but that could be an option for you.
00:25:12.980 | The scanning software does a good job generally of correcting for a little bit of distortion
00:25:17.740 | as well.
00:25:18.740 | So you get very readable scans.
00:25:21.540 | But now the question is how do you read it?
00:25:23.380 | The obvious solution is you can read on your computer.
00:25:25.780 | You have this nice PDF.
00:25:27.660 | And I always keep my scanner on a setting that doesn't reject blank pages.
00:25:32.340 | The ScanSnap software allows you to automatically reject blank pages.
00:25:37.180 | That's very useful if you're scanning a stack of documents and most of them are written
00:25:40.800 | on the front, but you want to capture a few notes on the back.
00:25:43.700 | That's useful.
00:25:44.980 | But for reading, I want to make sure that the book is laid out on screen exactly as
00:25:49.700 | it is in the actual physical book.
00:25:54.980 | I find this works really well with using the built-in software on my Mac.
00:25:59.700 | If I just take one of these PDFs and I open it up using the built-in preview software
00:26:03.300 | on my Mac, it displays it on screen with a nice full page side-by-side view.
00:26:08.160 | And I like to read like that because it shows the book there, and if I'm willing to sit
00:26:12.100 | on a desk, then it makes it nice.
00:26:13.620 | I can write in a notebook or I can read it fairly comfortably if I'm willing to be at
00:26:18.200 | my computer.
00:26:20.060 | But of course, we like to read with other devices, other tablets and things as well.
00:26:24.340 | So I use a Mac, and on my Mac I use a software program called Calibre.
00:26:30.740 | And from my research, this seems to be the standard for managing a library.
00:26:35.540 | Calibre is a very powerful program.
00:26:38.340 | It's an open source program that's freely available.
00:26:41.460 | The developers do a good job of continually updating it, but it's an open source program
00:26:45.420 | that's focused on one task, and that task is managing a library.
00:26:49.940 | It's not particularly beautiful, but it is very effective.
00:26:53.660 | And so if you want the ability to manage a library, then that works really well.
00:26:58.800 | And what I like about it is in addition to all of my scanned books, I can fully integrate
00:27:03.780 | all of my digital books that I've previously bought, and I can also integrate all of my
00:27:09.400 | various papers and books and e-books and things that you collect around the web, all of the
00:27:13.980 | things that have been available for you.
00:27:16.620 | And so right now I have about 1,300 books in my Calibre library, and they can be tagged,
00:27:21.180 | they can be organized according to authors, etc.
00:27:24.700 | Calibre is really powerful for that purpose, and I really like it.
00:27:28.940 | When we come back to digital books in just a moment, you'll see why this is so particularly
00:27:32.060 | valuable.
00:27:33.420 | The other reason I like Calibre is Calibre allows me to navigate and manage a physical
00:27:40.220 | reading tablet device without having to go through the internet.
00:27:43.780 | Now there are options that are limited on this.
00:27:47.500 | For example, I had an older iPad that I wanted to use as my reader.
00:27:51.700 | It's got a very nice screen, it would be nice to read on, but the problem is how do you
00:27:55.300 | get the files onto it?
00:27:57.740 | And I haven't been able to find a way of physically connecting my computer to that iPad and moving
00:28:03.740 | the files onto it without going through some kind of internet server, and I didn't want
00:28:08.020 | to go through an internet server.
00:28:10.420 | So what I've chosen to do is I purchased a standalone Amazon Kindle and a standalone
00:28:16.260 | Amazon Fire tablet, one of the color tablets.
00:28:19.940 | Now the Fire tablet is very cheap, Amazon is selling these very inexpensively, and I
00:28:24.220 | use that particular tablet for viewing PDFs.
00:28:27.660 | Now of course the modern versions of the Kindle will view PDFs really beautifully, sorry,
00:28:33.980 | adequately, they'll view PDFs adequately, but they're not beautiful, and I don't find
00:28:37.900 | them particularly pleasurable to read on, but the Fire tablet that Amazon sells is effective,
00:28:46.460 | it's got a good color screen and you can use it to view PDFs.
00:28:50.020 | What I like about the Fire tablet is it's easy for me to just plug the USB cable in
00:28:55.780 | and directly transfer PDF files from my computer over onto the Fire tablet, and I just use
00:29:02.460 | Adobe PDF Reader, Acrobat, or whatever is on the Fire to view them.
00:29:06.860 | I don't use the tablet for anything else, it's a very insecure tablet, I'm sure it does
00:29:11.220 | all that other stuff, but I don't use it for anything else, and I don't ever connect it
00:29:14.600 | to the internet, I just use it for transferring the PDFs over from my computer to the tablet.
00:29:20.640 | So I always keep a few hundred books on the tablet that I'm reading, and then as I read
00:29:25.380 | them, then I go ahead and I take them off the tablet and I keep all of my notes and
00:29:28.820 | data for those books on my actual computer.
00:29:31.740 | And then I do the same thing with the Kindle.
00:29:34.400 | So I have an Amazon Kindle, you can purchase a newer one or a used one, I don't care since
00:29:39.500 | I don't use the system, I deactivate the Wi-Fi, I deactivate the Wi-Fi and the cellular connections
00:29:47.560 | if it has it, and I just plug the cable in.
00:29:50.060 | And so Calibre and the Kindle or Fire is beautiful, it's so easy to move books onto the device,
00:29:58.380 | off the device, you just plug in your USB cable, it works really, really well.
00:30:02.620 | I haven't tested some of the other tablets that are out there, I don't know the Nook,
00:30:06.500 | etc., I don't know how effective those are, but a tablet that you can get for 30 or 40
00:30:12.300 | bucks for the Fire or for the Kindle that you can get, the new Kindles cost a little
00:30:17.580 | bit more, they're a little bit nicer, you can get an older one for 30 bucks, they work
00:30:20.900 | fine, those work really, really well.
00:30:23.140 | So I use the Kindle for displaying all of the native e-books that I have, and I also
00:30:29.000 | use the Fire for displaying PDFs, and I just pick one of those, whichever one I want to
00:30:34.020 | read, then I use those.
00:30:35.700 | I found that effective, so it allows me to carry the tablet device with the books because
00:30:40.460 | I don't have anything else on the devices other than just books, it allows me to stay
00:30:44.220 | focused and it displays the text that I'm seeking to read.
00:30:48.580 | One of the wonderful things about Calibre is it does help you with the use of a few
00:30:53.820 | plugins, it does help you from time to time to be able to strip the DRM off of your purchases.
00:31:00.620 | So here I need to refer you to the internet because anything that I tell you will be immediately
00:31:04.300 | changed in the next software publication.
00:31:06.140 | I'll just tell you what you can do is you can get all of your books, all of your e-books
00:31:12.020 | out of the clutches of whoever you bought them from.
00:31:16.320 | You may have to install some plugins, you may have to play with the system a little
00:31:19.580 | bit, but I really appreciate having all of my e-books stripped of their DRM.
00:31:26.300 | E-books really are wonderful, especially some of the resources of older books.
00:31:31.460 | And if you start to use Calibre, I think it really opens up some options for you because
00:31:36.100 | so many of the public domain books of the past are now available to you with Project
00:31:40.420 | Gutenberg and many other websites that are available.
00:31:43.080 | You can load up a Kindle with all kinds of quality reading, and I intend to use this
00:31:46.840 | in the future with our children, with their education, etc.
00:31:53.140 | You can create different categories with Calibre and you can keep all kinds of different books.
00:31:57.720 | And so it's really, really wonderful.
00:31:59.260 | I do love having access to the whole library right there, and I especially love it while
00:32:04.140 | on the road.
00:32:05.140 | I have all of my textbooks, everything right here, so as I'm working on projects I don't
00:32:09.820 | have to carry...
00:32:10.820 | I mean, I had two shelves that are three foot, so I had, let's call it 72 inches of...
00:32:19.140 | No, more than that.
00:32:21.660 | Call it six to eight feet of bookshelf space taken up exclusively by financial planning
00:32:26.100 | textbooks.
00:32:27.100 | Well, those are all now in a file where I can easily access them.
00:32:32.420 | That's really cool.
00:32:33.420 | It's really useful because it keeps the content available to me without having to figure out
00:32:39.580 | where on earth do I put these eight feet of textbooks.
00:32:43.260 | So I really like that.
00:32:44.260 | So for me that has been worth it.
00:32:45.820 | I would commend it to you.
00:32:47.420 | That's the system I've come up with.
00:32:49.300 | I don't claim it's the best, but it does help me, I think, to get many of the benefits of
00:32:55.260 | modern e-books and modern tablet technology with a few of the drawbacks.
00:33:01.100 | I do really like reading on the Kindle device.
00:33:04.700 | It is very effective.
00:33:06.500 | I like the fact that it doesn't have a screen, so that's good for your head.
00:33:09.740 | It doesn't strain your eyes.
00:33:11.900 | It's nice to read outside.
00:33:15.300 | And using the system the way that I use it, where that Kindle never connects to the internet,
00:33:22.820 | allows me to maintain and keep back some of the privacy concerns about what I'm reading
00:33:26.660 | and how I'm reading it, how fast I'm reading it.
00:33:29.760 | So I like that, and the Kindle's very pleasurable to read on.
00:33:33.180 | Fire tablet, meh.
00:33:34.800 | It's okay.
00:33:35.800 | I really wish I could get an iPad to work, but iPad doesn't talk well with Calibre, and
00:33:41.180 | I'm not willing to go through all of the hassle that other people have done so far.
00:33:45.980 | So that's what I have done, and to my listeners' questions, I hope that that will help you.
00:33:50.540 | I do warn you this.
00:33:51.860 | Don't sit down and try to brute force your books with a plate glass scanner.
00:33:56.420 | That is impossible.
00:33:57.900 | You need, if you're going to do this, be prepared to either pay for it, to buy the equipment,
00:34:02.440 | or just pay somebody to do it.
00:34:04.900 | You should look at prices.
00:34:08.340 | It's a lot of work.
00:34:09.740 | I've done it, but it's a huge amount of work.
00:34:12.540 | Only do it if you can do something else productive while you are doing those books.
00:34:16.820 | You should seriously consider just paying somebody.
00:34:19.300 | This would be a good job for you to pay a young boy or girl to do for you.
00:34:24.380 | There's no reason at all why they couldn't do this competently.
00:34:26.980 | You should consider paying one of the services, but if you want to do it the way that I did,
00:34:31.340 | get yourself a paper cutter, a scanner, and caliber.
00:34:36.420 | I hope that you will regain some shelf space while still having access to the knowledge
00:34:42.900 | that you need to become a better chess player.
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