RPF0575-How__Why_I_Scanned_My_Entire_Library_So_I_Can_Carry_It_With_Me_On_The_Road
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00:00:32.160 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight,
00:00:36.160 | and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:39.240 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:42.640 | My name is Joshua. I am your host. And today we answer a listener question.
00:00:45.520 | And the listener writes in and says, "Joshua, good evening. I've been listening for a while,
00:00:48.720 | and I remember that during one episode, you briefly went into how you were scanning all of your books to PDF.
00:00:53.280 | I was wondering, will you please elaborate some more on that for me?
00:00:56.160 | Did you have a high-end duplex scanner or software specially made for assembling the multiple scans of the pages of the books?
00:01:02.560 | Or did you brute force it for all of your books with simply a plate glass scanner?
00:01:06.800 | The process of separating the bindings and, most of all, scanning each individual page
00:01:11.360 | seems very cumbersome with my run-of-the-mill HP scanner/printer combo.
00:01:15.640 | I'm curious because one of my hobbies is playing chess, and I'm usually unable to resist the
00:01:20.360 | unspoken promise of rapid chess improvement if I buy just one more chess book.
00:01:25.000 | My wife would like me to consolidate the plethora of chess knowledge on my bookshelves,
00:01:29.960 | but I'm loathe to throw away some of the books before I have yet had the chance to study them,
00:01:33.880 | even if I admit that it's likely I never will get to all of them.
00:01:37.480 | Thank you, Joshua. Keep up the good work."
00:01:39.400 | It's a good question, and I have personal experience and personal thoughts on this that I think will be useful for you today.
00:01:46.520 | First, a short sales pitch on reading.
00:01:50.040 | I have met only a handful of wealthy people who were not readers, and even that handful of wealthy
00:01:56.680 | people who were not readers and yet had managed to become wealthy, my analysis is that is a deficiency,
00:02:04.520 | and they were successful in spite of that personal shortcoming and that personal deficiency,
00:02:10.280 | not because of it. I have never met someone who proudly proclaims, "Ah, I'm just not a reader,"
00:02:16.600 | who I've generally looked at and said, "Well, I just want to be just like them."
00:02:22.920 | Generally, the people who most loudly proclaim such statements frequently, their lives reflect
00:02:29.400 | the fact that they are not readers and that they don't have the opportunity to gain the benefit
00:02:34.760 | of the wisdom of the ages. Now, that's not universally true. There have been people
00:02:39.400 | who have been successful that I've come in contact with or observed that aren't readers,
00:02:44.280 | but at least usually when they say, "I'm not a reader," they've often said so with a note of
00:02:50.600 | apology, recognizing that they probably would get better results if they were a reader. There is no
00:02:56.600 | more efficient mechanism for the acquisition of knowledge and information than reading.
00:03:02.360 | Listening doesn't do it. Watching videos doesn't do it. Sitting in classes doesn't do it.
00:03:09.400 | Talking to people and gaining just from your own life experience doesn't do it. Now,
00:03:13.400 | all of those things are important. Audio is helpful. Video is useful. Classes are wonderful,
00:03:17.880 | and your own personal experience is crucial. But reading should be the foundation of all of our
00:03:25.480 | educational platforms. Unfortunately, in our modern age, too many of us have the thought that
00:03:31.800 | education is something that happens to us. We go to school and we get our education instead of
00:03:37.560 | becoming learners intent and focused on constant self-education. Reading is very efficient because
00:03:45.240 | you can change the pace of reading as appropriate to the content. Some books need about 10 minutes.
00:03:53.480 | Some books need 10 minutes per page or more. And it's only with the technology of reading
00:04:01.800 | that you can apply the appropriate pace and tempo to your studies.
00:04:05.400 | Reading is a skill that has to be developed and learned. But I'm personally convinced that
00:04:11.800 | the very first of your investment dollars should be invested into books, and your time should be
00:04:19.960 | invested into books. They're one of the best investments. Books are uniquely rich in content,
00:04:27.880 | especially the good books, the best books, the great books. Books are
00:04:33.240 | works of, are labors, labors of love, usually, by their author. It takes so much time for an author
00:04:41.320 | to sit down and consider their thoughts and develop those thoughts and put them into a book
00:04:45.640 | that people don't generally do it casually. Only a handful of books are written quickly and
00:04:51.000 | published immediately. Rather, an author will generally labor and labor and labor for hundreds
00:04:57.000 | or thousands of hours over their content. And in preparation for their content, they will usually
00:05:01.640 | bring a lifetime of study or at least years of study, years of interest, many interviews,
00:05:08.520 | much thinking and organization to their topic. They'll bring that and put it into a book.
00:05:12.920 | And they'll usually draw on the work, the collected works of others throughout history
00:05:17.240 | who've done the same thing. So when you read a good book, you're usually reading the output of
00:05:22.760 | dozens of great focused minds applied to a specific problem. And so there's a good chance
00:05:29.240 | that you'll get a good result. Now, not all books are great, but you can spot the great ones quickly
00:05:34.760 | and spot the not great ones quickly and adjust your time appropriately. So books are a wonderful
00:05:41.560 | investment, but they do come with a problem. And that problem is how do you store them?
00:05:45.400 | Now, my listener's wife would like him to consolidate some of the books on his bookshelves,
00:05:50.920 | and my wife feels exactly the same way. My wife is a reader, but she very much, unlike me,
00:05:56.280 | she very much would ascribe to the Marie Kondo theory of books that once you have read it,
00:06:00.920 | it's become a part of you and there's no reason to keep it around any longer.
00:06:04.200 | I appreciate that, but that's not been my experience. And in her opinion, books look
00:06:10.040 | like clutter. And so she doesn't like to see clutter in the house, doesn't want to have a
00:06:13.880 | bunch of bookshelves in the house. Well, that's a little bit at odds with my own decorating
00:06:19.880 | intention where I would be happy to live in a house that was stacked with nothing but bookshelves.
00:06:25.960 | I do prefer them to be on the bookshelves. I'm not quite like the Clive Cussler character,
00:06:32.440 | I think it was St. Julian Perlmutter, who was an elderly eccentric man who lived in a house where
00:06:37.960 | there wasn't any surface left because every bookshelf was full and there was a stack on
00:06:42.680 | every floor. I like my books to be neat, but I do like to have them around. And that performs a
00:06:49.000 | challenge because it's challenging to figure out where do you store them, where do you keep them.
00:06:52.280 | Books are best displayed on a bookshelf. If they're going to actually be useful,
00:06:56.280 | they're best displayed on a bookshelf. And I affirm that from personal experience. I've tried
00:07:00.520 | other methods of sorting and maintaining books. In the past, when we moved from a larger house
00:07:06.200 | into a smaller apartment, one of the problems was what do I do with all my books? And so my plan at
00:07:10.680 | that point in time was I went from using bookshelves to using some of those sturdy industrial shelves
00:07:17.160 | that you can buy that are two feet by four feet in size. And I put large plastic bins on those
00:07:21.560 | shelves and I put all my books in the bins. I went through and I inventory the titles and authors of
00:07:26.200 | the books and I made an inventory list so I would know which bin to access when I needed a certain
00:07:32.360 | book. And I thought that that would work well. It did not work. Books belong on bookshelves.
00:07:37.720 | So I tell you that first and foremost. But bookshelves require time, it's space,
00:07:41.800 | and there's a financial cost to maintaining those bookshelves. You have to have them. So either it's
00:07:46.920 | the visual space needed or the financial investment of renting a larger apartment,
00:07:52.360 | buying a larger house, etc. So it's been a constant question that I have wrestled with.
00:07:59.240 | I like the idea of having a personal library and in the future I want to make sure that our house
00:08:06.040 | always has a large personal library. To me that's important. But recently in preparation for traveling,
00:08:13.640 | I decided that this time I would go ahead and try digitizing my books. And I learned a lot for that.
00:08:20.040 | By the way, I should also address one of the questions that you might have about what about
00:08:26.040 | the use of a library. I personally like to use libraries. The places I like to go to, libraries,
00:08:32.440 | I enjoy being in libraries. And I love libraries, especially for the purpose of scanning a topic.
00:08:38.680 | Generally, since the time I was, as long as I can remember, if I go to the library,
00:08:43.800 | I'll usually walk out with anywhere from 30 to 50 books or more. I've always maintained a maximum
00:08:51.800 | borrowing on various library cards that I've ever had. I don't read all of them, but I absorb
00:08:58.280 | a decent amount of what I'm interested in those books. And so there's no better tool than a good
00:09:04.200 | library for being able to scan a topic that you have interest in and gain a sense of that topic.
00:09:12.280 | This would be referred to if you were studying how to read a book, the classic text on how to
00:09:22.600 | be a better reader. One of the terms that Mortimer Adler gave me, the author of that
00:09:26.920 | particular text, one of the terms that he gave is what's called syntopical reading.
00:09:32.840 | And that's where you survey a particular subject. So if you're studying a particular issue, perhaps
00:09:38.520 | it's gardening in general, or a specific type of gardening, or perhaps you're studying a
00:09:43.080 | philosophical question. One of the things that you need to do is you need to search out all of
00:09:49.320 | the literature that's been produced on that subject, and then you need to scan it and read it
00:09:53.720 | syntopically so that you can understand what the key questions are. And then you go back and you
00:09:58.760 | identify the key texts that you need to really study. But I've always found that's easy to do
00:10:04.440 | with a library. You can go to a library, you can pick a topic, and you can just grab 30 books off
00:10:09.560 | the shelves, take them home and browse through them over the course of a week or so. And you'll
00:10:14.040 | quickly understand the basic outlines of a particular topic. So that's what I like to use
00:10:18.280 | for libraries. The challenge for me is books that I actually want to read or that I actually read,
00:10:22.920 | I usually want to interact with those books. For me, interacting with the book through the use of
00:10:30.680 | marginalia, the underlining, the highlighting, the questions that I write, that's important to me
00:10:37.240 | because it helps me to interact with the author, helps me to pay attention when I read, and it
00:10:42.280 | helps me to note my own thoughts and questions. So my own personal systems of marginalia are
00:10:48.600 | relatively simple, but I just have a goal that I want to make the book actually mine. So I highlight
00:10:55.320 | with liberality, I underline without feeling bad about it, I mark questions, I circle, I try to
00:11:03.480 | interact with the author, I write my own thoughts or questions as I'm reading so that I can see if
00:11:09.800 | the author's going to answer them as I continue on. I have little symbols that I use for an action
00:11:14.920 | point. So I'll put a little check mark if there's something that I need to do an action point. I
00:11:18.920 | keep at the front of the book a list of to-do items, of things that I need to change or things
00:11:23.560 | that I want to do or things that I want to look at based upon what I read in the book. And so
00:11:27.640 | by the time I'm done reading a book, it's pretty well destroyed for the use of somebody else.
00:11:31.880 | But I find that that helps me to get the most out of my book. And then based upon my own system of
00:11:38.520 | marginalia, once I've read the book, I don't need to read it again. If I ever need to come back to
00:11:43.640 | that book, I can usually remember what's in it. I can remember what I read and I can come back and
00:11:48.680 | I can quickly look at my highlights or my underlines or the major questions or my summary of
00:11:53.960 | it. And I can understand if the book was, well, I can understand what was there. And so I never
00:12:00.520 | need to read a book twice, but I want to keep that system of marginalia. And that's been a
00:12:06.120 | challenge for me because in the past, I've gone through various phases of decluttering.
00:12:10.280 | About five years ago, I was decluttering books because I had, it just seems like most of my life,
00:12:15.800 | I wind up with these boxes of books and most of them I've read, a lot of them I haven't. And
00:12:20.280 | they just accumulate and accumulate and accumulate. And so I just decided, okay,
00:12:24.760 | that's it. I'm going to get rid of some. But about five years ago, I got rid of,
00:12:29.960 | I think I would say probably 500, 800 books, something like that. And I had sorted them
00:12:35.800 | carefully and I kept the most important ones, but I went ahead and I was hardcore and I got
00:12:39.800 | rid of lots of them. But then I would regret that because there was one idea and I remembered what
00:12:44.760 | the book was and I went looking for it. I got rid of it because it wasn't a great book, but I had
00:12:48.680 | this one particular idea. So this time in preparation for traveling, I decided to try
00:12:53.880 | scanning and I thought I would try it. And I had listened to my friend, Jake DeSilis' discussion
00:13:03.080 | on this topic on his podcast, The Voluntary Life. Jake is an entrepreneur. He is an early retirement
00:13:09.640 | writer and he and his wife have been living a location independent lifestyle for the last few
00:13:15.960 | years. But as a reader himself, he wrestled with this question. And what he wound up doing was
00:13:22.200 | scanning all of his library so that he could carry it with him in his computer and in his
00:13:27.880 | various digital devices. After hearing his system, I decided to do the same thing. And so I decided
00:13:34.840 | to go ahead and scan my books and keep them with me as scanned copies of books. Before I go to the
00:13:42.040 | exact system of what I did and what I recommend for you, I should also touch on the question of
00:13:46.360 | digital books versus paper books. In today's world, we're grateful, of course, that there are
00:13:53.160 | huge numbers of digital books available. And digital books are superior in terms of a native
00:13:59.880 | digital format, something that's published in an EPUB or a Kindle format or some native ebook format
00:14:08.680 | that works with your ebook reader, whether that's a reader that you're using on your computer or on
00:14:14.520 | a handheld device of some kind. A native digital book is superior for your reading experience.
00:14:20.920 | The problem with relying exclusively or primarily on digital books that are in ebook formats is,
00:14:28.200 | at least for the type of nonfiction reading that I engage in, that limits you to new books.
00:14:34.520 | Very few publishers are going back to a book that was published in 1981 that sold 10,000 copies and
00:14:40.920 | saying, "Let's issue this in an ebook format." So first of all, the major problem with digital
00:14:46.440 | books is they only get new books and books that are larger, whereas paper books, there are millions
00:14:51.800 | and millions of them out there. And with paper books, you can actually usually get a better deal
00:14:57.160 | with the used book marketplaces, whether that's on the large sites like Amazon or on the various
00:15:02.280 | other sites. You can go and buy a book for the shipping cost. It's a penny plus the shipping
00:15:08.520 | cost most books, $3.49, $4, $8, et cetera. I'll buy books all day long for $4 a piece just to
00:15:16.360 | look at them when they're related to a topic, but that means you accumulate a lot of paper books.
00:15:20.200 | The other problem with digital books that I have is that they are generally going to have some
00:15:25.560 | system of digital rights management associated with them. And the digital rights management
00:15:30.280 | systems limit you to an exclusive platform for those books to work, and they limit your ownership
00:15:38.760 | of it. Now, I'm conflicted on this. I'm not a DRM-free purist like some people are, but just as
00:15:46.040 | a practical matter, I hate to be stuck in the DRM system. A simple example, let's take on buying
00:15:52.520 | Kindle books. Let's say that you go to Amazon and you buy Kindle books on Amazon. Amazon has a
00:15:58.440 | wonderful system to connect you with those Kindle books. And the Kindle book marketplace is huge.
00:16:05.240 | You can get so many great books there. But the problem is you can't integrate those Kindle books
00:16:10.920 | with the books that you buy for your Nook. And the other problem is in order to maintain those
00:16:15.480 | Kindle books, you have to maintain the same Amazon account. Well, I'm a little bit concerned
00:16:22.680 | about maintaining one in-place record of all of the books that I buy and that I read with one
00:16:28.600 | Amazon account over the period of years. I think that you should swap out your Amazon accounts
00:16:32.680 | at least every couple of years. You should set up a new one with a new name and a new
00:16:36.840 | identity and a new location so that they aren't all connected in one particular record.
00:16:42.360 | And also as technology changes, you want to keep those from one thing to another.
00:16:47.400 | So that's hard to do with the DRM of Amazon. I also don't like the way that all the data is
00:16:53.240 | collected with digital book readings. So Amazon, again, as an example, has fairly,
00:16:57.720 | you don't have the same privacy of reading a Kindle book as you do with reading a paper book.
00:17:05.560 | Kindle knows exactly how far you've read. They know exactly how fast you've read. They know
00:17:12.280 | what you're reading, exactly what you're reading, exactly what you're underlining. If you're taking
00:17:16.440 | any notes in those, which is of course difficult to do, but if you do take any notes in your digital
00:17:21.320 | book, you know that, in your Amazon system, which means that some of your most personal thoughts
00:17:25.560 | and your most personal insights and the personal things that you're researching are now available
00:17:30.840 | and categorized in a database that is exposed to the exploits of somebody who may be looking
00:17:37.640 | to find that information out. Of course, for the most part, that's not that big of a risk,
00:17:43.000 | but there's a decent chance that at some point in time, somebody might want to gain access to that.
00:17:49.400 | Now you can change some of those settings. You can turn them from public to private. You can
00:17:52.680 | turn off some of the data collection, but digital books just don't give the same degree of privacy.
00:17:57.160 | And I'd be pretty uncomfortable with any creation of all of the things that I read,
00:18:04.360 | because without context, the particular interests that I have of reading about
00:18:09.720 | to various people might or might not look like something that they should be concerned about.
00:18:15.720 | Context is important. So I don't care so much for digital books, and I don't love
00:18:23.000 | some of the modern DRM practices that are foisted upon us by all of the major,
00:18:32.680 | well, most of the major book publishers. I do have some solutions to that, because I still buy
00:18:36.680 | digital books, but I have some solutions to improve that. So first, let me talk about the
00:18:40.920 | paper books, and then let's talk about digital books at the end. So here's what I have done,
00:18:45.720 | and what I have had. It's the best system that I have come up with. First of all, in order to
00:18:49.880 | scan the books, I have engaged in, I guess, for lack of a better term, it's called destructive
00:18:58.040 | scanning, which means that I physically destroy the book for the purpose of scanning it. That
00:19:03.160 | means that I cut the spine off, and I separate the papers out so that I can run it through a scanner.
00:19:09.240 | The way that I do that, I've done this a few different ways, is first, I've done some books
00:19:14.520 | manually. If you just sit down with a book and you rip off, if it's a hard cover, you just rip
00:19:19.320 | off the hard cover, and you can separate the pages one by one. You can pull off a dozen pages and
00:19:25.080 | slice off the ends. You can do it manually. I've done that with a few dozen books.
00:19:28.440 | You can do this to some degree with a standard office paper cutter,
00:19:32.280 | but in my experience, I'd rather do scissors than that standard office paper cutter. But if you have
00:19:37.800 | anything more than, say, a couple dozen books that you intend to do this to at a time, you
00:19:41.720 | definitely don't want to do this manually. What you want to do is you want to get a guillotine
00:19:46.360 | paper cutter, and you want to go towards one of the more commercial ones. So the one that I have
00:19:52.200 | used, that I borrowed from somebody, was a fairly... It wasn't a high-end commercial one,
00:20:00.200 | but it was just a common desk-type one that could do a couple hundred pages. And with most books,
00:20:05.880 | I could put in most books, most paperbacks, most hardback books, except for the very thickest of
00:20:10.760 | my textbooks, which I scanned all my textbooks as well. Then you can just slide them in there, and
00:20:18.200 | you crank the little wheel down, and you press the guillotine lever, and you slice off the spine.
00:20:23.880 | And that works really, really well. I used to work in a print shop, and we had a big,
00:20:27.880 | giant one that could do 500 pages or 1,000 pages at a time. That's what you use after you do a
00:20:33.480 | printing. Then you come and you do the trimming, and that's the kind of thing you use for that.
00:20:37.000 | Well, you can get a home version of that for your home. If you don't have one of those,
00:20:43.000 | you got to get that. So plan on that in terms of your costs. In my case, I was able to borrow one,
00:20:47.560 | so I don't still own it, but I can have access to it anytime I want to.
00:20:51.720 | So you have to cut up and destroy the books. I believe there are services that will do that for
00:20:55.640 | you. I believe you can ship the books off, and I would recommend that you consider it,
00:20:59.720 | because it's very time-intensive. If you can look at a service, and they charge you
00:21:04.040 | modest price, a couple bucks a book, something like that, it's probably worth it to go ahead
00:21:09.240 | and ship the books off and have somebody with commercial equipment do the destruction of the
00:21:13.400 | book and then scan it for you. What I chose to do was I chose to purchase a scanner that's called a
00:21:18.040 | ScanSnap ix500. At the time that I was doing this research, and it was the basic standard out there
00:21:24.920 | for a high-end home scanner. It's a duplex scanner, which means that you can put a stack of
00:21:32.280 | pages, you can put 100 pages from the book on the scanner, and it'll feed it through automatically,
00:21:37.000 | pulling off the bottom, and it'll automatically scan both sides of the book. My version of the
00:21:43.240 | ix500 scans at about 30 pages a minute, so that can make pretty quick work of a book. You do have
00:21:50.920 | to sit there and feed it, but it'll scan 30 pages a minute automatically, and it'll create a PDF for
00:21:56.120 | you. And if you've done a good job with your cutting of the book to eliminate binding, to
00:22:01.000 | eliminate adhesives, and to eliminate double pages, it's fairly trouble-free. You learn over
00:22:06.200 | time that you need to cut off more than you'd like to, because you want to make sure there's
00:22:09.160 | no binding or glue residue that's holding pages together, because that just messes up all the
00:22:13.160 | scans. But it's fairly trouble-free, and so you can run it through with the scanner. In hindsight,
00:22:19.080 | given the fact that if I didn't own or have access to the loan of a guillotine paper cutter,
00:22:26.680 | I might consider buying one of the more expensive scanners that is purpose-designed for scanning
00:22:33.400 | books. And there are, so the scan snap is about 450, 500 books, sorry, 500 bucks for the scanner.
00:22:41.160 | If you can increase your price of the scanner up to about 750, 800 bucks, you can get a scanner
00:22:48.600 | that sits on the paper, and as you flip the pages of a book, it'll automatically take a snapshot of
00:22:54.840 | the book and scan it. And that does, for the reviews that I looked at, that does a pretty
00:23:00.040 | good job. Now, obviously, financially, that's a pretty tough nut to swallow. When I was searching,
00:23:05.320 | I didn't find many on the used market. I would imagine you could buy one of those,
00:23:08.760 | digitize your library, and sell it for a decent price, but I don't know those numbers. And because
00:23:14.200 | that particular type of scanner is purpose-focused on books, it didn't have as much utility as I felt
00:23:20.120 | having the ScanSnap Duplex ix500 would be, because the ix500 is something that you can use and keep
00:23:28.600 | on hand constantly for digitizing your life. It's so simple, it can take a stack of mixed paper,
00:23:36.200 | receipts, invoices, documents for your home, et cetera. And so you can, since you can scan just
00:23:43.560 | about anything that'll slide through the scanning bed, it has a much greater versatility. And so,
00:23:50.280 | you have to factor that in. You're trying to buy these books cheap and avoid from buying them in
00:23:53.800 | the future, because you're trying to create this archive. But still, if you've got to buy a scanner,
00:23:57.480 | you've got to factor that into your pricing. Because I have so much versatility continuing
00:24:03.640 | from the ScanSnap, I feel good about that decision. I've used it a lot, and I like the fact
00:24:08.520 | that I can continue to digitize things going forward, because that will continually keep for me
00:24:15.560 | a lower footprint. I'll need less physical space because I have more things digitally archived
00:24:22.680 | than physically archived. So I really like that. So you need to cut the books up. You need a good
00:24:26.920 | paper cutter that can do a couple hundred pages at once, and a scanner. Again, look for those,
00:24:32.920 | see if you can sell them out, sell them in the future. What ScanSnap creates for you is a PDF.
00:24:40.840 | And that PDF is a pretty good quality. You can scan in black and white, which is really nice
00:24:45.800 | because it cleans up even some of the old yellowed pages in your older books. Or you can scan in
00:24:51.400 | color if that's important to you. And the scans are pretty high quality, which means that you could
00:24:56.680 | apply to the process an optical character recognition program, OCR, which would in a sense
00:25:03.400 | digitize the text on the page. I don't bother with that because I haven't seen the need for it,
00:25:09.240 | and I don't need all those files. I just keep the PDFs, but that could be an option for you.
00:25:14.120 | The scanning software does a good job generally of correcting for a little bit of distortion as
00:25:19.160 | well. So you get very readable scans. But now the question is, how do you read it? Well, the obvious
00:25:25.160 | solution is you can read on your computer. You have this nice PDF. And I always keep my scanner
00:25:30.360 | on a setting that doesn't reject blank pages. The ScanSnap software allows you to automatically
00:25:36.840 | reject blank pages. That's very useful if you're scanning a stack of documents and most of them
00:25:41.880 | are written on the front, but you want to capture a few notes on the back. That's useful. But for
00:25:46.840 | reading, I want to make sure that the book is laid out on screen exactly as it is in the actual
00:25:53.240 | physical book. I find this works really well with using the built-in software on my Mac.
00:26:00.840 | If I just take one of these PDFs and I open it up using the built-in preview software on my Mac,
00:26:05.400 | it displays it on screen with a nice full page side-by-side view. And I like to read like that
00:26:10.680 | because it shows the book there. And if I'm willing to sit on a desk, then it makes it nice.
00:26:14.920 | I can write in a notebook or I can read it fairly comfortably if I'm willing to be at my computer.
00:26:21.160 | But of course, we'd like to read with other devices, other tablets and things as well.
00:26:25.480 | So I use a Mac and on my Mac, I use a software program called Calibre. C-A-L-I-B-R-E. And from
00:26:32.280 | my research, this seems to be the standard for managing a library. Calibre is a very powerful
00:26:39.160 | program. It's an open source program that's freely available. The developers do a good job of
00:26:44.040 | continually updating it, but it's an open source program that's focused on one task and that task
00:26:49.000 | is managing a library. It's not particularly beautiful, but it is a very effective. And so
00:26:55.160 | if you want the ability to manage a library, then that works really well. And what I like about it
00:27:01.000 | is in addition to all of my scanned books, I can fully integrate all of my digital books that I've
00:27:07.160 | previously bought. And I can also integrate all of my various papers and books and eBooks and
00:27:13.160 | things that you collect around the web, all of the things that have been available for you.
00:27:17.800 | And so right now I have about 1300 books in my Calibre library and they can be tagged,
00:27:22.440 | they can be organized according to authors, et cetera. Calibre is really powerful for that
00:27:28.120 | purpose and I really like it. When we come back to digital books in just a moment, you'll see why
00:27:32.280 | this is so particularly valuable. The other reason I like Calibre is Calibre allows me to navigate
00:27:39.080 | and manage a physical reading tablet device without having to go through the internet. Now,
00:27:46.280 | there are options that are limited on this. For example, I've had an older iPad that I wanted to
00:27:51.960 | use as my reader. It's got a very nice screen, it would be nice to read on, but the problem is how
00:27:56.520 | do you get the files onto it? And I haven't been able to find a way of physically connecting my
00:28:02.440 | computer to that iPad and moving the files onto it without going through some kind of internet
00:28:08.600 | server and I didn't want to go through an internet server. So what I've chosen to do is I purchased
00:28:13.880 | a standalone Amazon Kindle and a standalone Amazon Fire tablet, one of the color tablets. Now,
00:28:21.640 | the Fire tablet is very cheap. Amazon is selling these very inexpensively and I use that particular
00:28:26.600 | tablet for viewing PDFs. Now, of course, the modern versions of the Kindle will view PDFs
00:28:33.400 | really beautifully, sorry, adequately. They'll view PDFs adequately, but they're not beautiful
00:28:38.600 | and I don't find them particularly pleasurable to read on. But the Fire tablet that Amazon sells
00:28:43.800 | is effective. It's got a good color screen and you can use it to view PDFs. What I like about
00:28:51.880 | the Fire tablet is it's easy for me to just plug the USB cable in and directly transfer PDF files
00:28:59.240 | from my computer over onto the Fire tablet. And I just use Adobe PDF Reader, Acrobat, or whatever
00:29:06.360 | is on the Fire to view them. I don't use the tablet for anything else. It's a very insecure
00:29:10.760 | tablet. I'm sure it does all that other stuff, but I don't use it for anything else. And I don't
00:29:15.320 | ever connect it to the internet. I just use it as for transferring the PDFs over from my computer to
00:29:21.320 | the tablet. So I always keep a few hundred books on the tablet that I'm reading. And then as I read
00:29:26.760 | them, then I go ahead and I take them off the tablet and I keep all of my notes and data for
00:29:31.160 | those books on my actual computer. And then I do the same thing with the Kindle. So I have an Amazon
00:29:36.440 | Kindle. You can purchase a newer one or a used one. I don't care since I don't use the system.
00:29:42.200 | I deactivate the Wi-Fi. I deactivate the Wi-Fi and the cellular connections if it has it. And
00:29:50.120 | I just plug the cable in. And so Calibre and the Kindle or Fire is beautiful. It's so easy to move
00:29:58.600 | books onto the device, off the device. You just plug in your USB cable. It works really, really
00:30:03.240 | well. I haven't tested some of the other tablets that are out there. I don't know the Nook, etc.
00:30:08.440 | I don't know how effective those are. But a tablet that you can get for 30 or 40 bucks for the Fire
00:30:15.160 | or for the Kindle that you can get. The new Kindles cost a little bit more. They're a little
00:30:19.720 | bit nicer. You can get an older one for 30 bucks. They work fine. Those work really, really well.
00:30:24.360 | So I use the Kindle for displaying all of the native e-books that I have. And I also use the
00:30:30.760 | Fire for displaying PDFs. And I just pick one of those, whichever one I want to read. Then I use
00:30:36.600 | those. I found that effective. So it allows me to carry the tablet device with the books because I
00:30:41.800 | don't have anything else on the devices other than just books. It allows me to stay focused
00:30:46.440 | and it displays the text that I'm seeking to read. One of the wonderful things about Calibre is it
00:30:53.160 | does help you with the use of a few plugins. It does help you from time to time to be able to
00:30:58.200 | strip the DRM off of your purchases. So here I need to refer you to the internet because anything
00:31:04.200 | that I tell you will be immediately changed in the next software publication. I'll just tell you
00:31:08.520 | what you can do is you can get all of your books, all of your e-books out of the clutches of
00:31:15.320 | whoever you bought them from. You may have to install some plugins. You may have to play with
00:31:20.280 | the system a little bit. But I really appreciate having all of my e-books stripped of their DRM.
00:31:27.160 | E-books really are wonderful, especially some of the resources of older books. And if you start to
00:31:33.320 | use Calibre, I think it really opens up some options for you because so many of the public
00:31:38.600 | domain books of the past are now available to you with Project Gutenberg and many other websites
00:31:43.240 | that are available. You can load up a Kindle with all kinds of quality reading. And I intend to use
00:31:48.040 | this in the future with our children, with their education, etc. You can create different categories
00:31:55.880 | with Calibre and you can keep all kinds of different books. And so it's really, really
00:31:59.880 | wonderful. I do love having access to the whole library right there. And I especially love it
00:32:05.080 | while on the road. I have all of my textbooks, everything right here. So as I'm working on
00:32:10.440 | projects, I don't have to carry. I mean, I had two shelves that are three foot. So I had, let's
00:32:17.560 | call it 72 inches of no more than that. I had call it six to eight feet of bookshelf space taken up
00:32:26.120 | exclusively by financial planning textbooks. Well, those are all now in a file where I can easily
00:32:33.080 | access them. That's really cool. It's really useful because it keeps the content available
00:32:39.160 | to me without having to figure out where on earth I put these eight feet of textbooks.
00:32:44.440 | So I really like that. So for me, that has been worth it. I would commend it to you.
00:32:48.520 | That's the system I've come up with. It's not that I don't claim it's the best,
00:32:52.360 | but it does help me, I think, to get many of the benefits of modern eBooks and modern tablet
00:32:59.480 | technology with a few of the drawbacks. I do really like reading on the Kindle device. It is
00:33:06.360 | very effective. I like the fact that it doesn't have a screen. So that's good for your head. It
00:33:11.080 | doesn't strain your eyes. It's nice to read outside. And using the system the way that I
00:33:18.200 | use it, where that Kindle never connects to the internet, allows me to maintain and keep back
00:33:25.880 | some of the privacy concerns about what I'm reading and how I'm reading it, how fast I'm
00:33:29.560 | reading it. So I like that. And the Kindle is very pleasurable to read on. Fire tablet,
00:33:35.320 | man, it's okay. I really wish I could get an iPad to work, but iPad doesn't talk well with
00:33:41.800 | caliber and I'm not willing to go through all of the hassle that other people have done so far.
00:33:47.080 | So that's what I have done. And to my listeners questions, I hope that that will help you.
00:33:51.480 | Don't, I do warn you this, don't sit down and try to brute force your books with a plate glass
00:33:57.160 | scanner. That is impossible. You need, if you're going to do this, be prepared to either pay for
00:34:02.040 | it, to buy the equipment or just pay somebody to do it. You should look at prices. It's a lot of
00:34:10.120 | work. I've done it, but it's a huge amount of work. Only do it if you can do something else
00:34:15.240 | productive while you are doing those books. You should seriously consider just paying somebody.
00:34:20.440 | This would be a good job for you to pay a young boy or girl to do for you. There's no reason at
00:34:26.360 | all why they couldn't do this competently. You should consider paying one of the services. But
00:34:30.840 | if you want to do it the way that I did, get yourself a paper cutter, a scanner, and caliber.
00:34:36.840 | And I hope that you will regain some shelf space while still having access to the knowledge
00:34:42.920 | that you need to become a better chess player.