Saturday, December 5, 2009

Technical Note

Those of you who know my technical interest will understand some of the directions I have been going to accomodate my reduced book library space. Since I no longer have the luxury of wall-to-wall book shelves in either an office or a house, I have been working to put books in digital form. I take a book, slice the spine using a special guillitine paper cutter, then scan the loose pages with my Fujitsu ScanSnap, sheet-fed (25 at a time) duplex scanner. In about 4-5 minutes, a stanard paperback book becomes an Adobe pdf document. When I get a DVD amount scanned, I then burn the pdf files to a DVD. So far I am averaging about 300 books per DVD. This is quite a space saving if you can live with reading digital. I then have a program that reads the DVD and exports the file names on the DVD to an Excel file. This Excel file and subsequent files will then become my database of what is on my DVD's I'll import the Excel files into a database program as csv files. In the meantime, I can search the Excel files for file title.

The next digital tool I am excited to get my hands on is a Barnes and Noble Nook. I was aware of the Amazon Kindle but not interested until I learned it and the Nook can read and display PDF files. I am going with the Nook because it offers better features. The Nook will take a memory card, microSD. I have a 16GB card. With what I am able to put on DVDs, I estimate I can load 1200 books onto a microSD card. Until SanDisck comes out with a 32GB and larger, I can carry several microSD cards and have a huge library the size of a paperback book to carry with me. What a great innovation!!! This is ideal for a guy who can live with electronic display and has to compact his library to an apartment. I won't see the Nook until January possible. I can't wait to have one in my hands. Stay posted, I'll let you know what I think.

No comments: