Scanning and storing books on Google Drive
Off With Its Head!
Armed with a Chinese guillotine and a scanner with an automatic document feeder, Mike Schilli gives his books some special treatment, courtesy of Google Drive, which offers 5GB of storage space – room enough to start an online PDF collection.
Some publishers are still wary of converting to digital books, although the trail was blazed long ago. But, who relishes the prospect of carrying around pounds of reading material on vacation, especially with excess baggage costing a fortune? And, why fill your shelves at home with dustcatching books that you might not even look at until your next move?
Admittedly, I’ve had my shelves at home filled with unread printed books for many years – and I’m not really interested in re-purchasing the digital formats, all the more so because most of the older works will probably never appear in digital editions. This is what prompted me to purchase a US$ 400 wonder scanner by Fujitsu. The second device is purely mechanical and goes by the Jacobin name of guillotine: a paper cutter weighing approximately 40 pounds (US$ 150 on eBay) that lets me separate books of up to 600 pages from their sleeves and bindings (Figure 1).
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Armbian 24.11 Released with Expanded Hardware Support
If you've been waiting for Armbian to support OrangePi 5 Max and Radxa ROCK 5B+, the wait is over.
-
SUSE Renames Several Products for Better Name Recognition
SUSE has been a very powerful player in the European market, but it knows it must branch out to gain serious traction. Will a name change do the trick?
-
ESET Discovers New Linux Malware
WolfsBane is an all-in-one malware that has hit the Linux operating system and includes a dropper, a launcher, and a backdoor.
-
New Linux Kernel Patch Allows Forcing a CPU Mitigation
Even when CPU mitigations can consume precious CPU cycles, it might not be a bad idea to allow users to enable them, even if your machine isn't vulnerable.
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 Released
Notify your friends, loved ones, and colleagues that the latest version of RHEL is available with plenty of enhancements.
-
Linux Sees Massive Performance Increase from a Single Line of Code
With one line of code, Intel was able to increase the performance of the Linux kernel by 4,000 percent.
-
Fedora KDE Approved as an Official Spin
If you prefer the Plasma desktop environment and the Fedora distribution, you're in luck because there's now an official spin that is listed on the same level as the Fedora Workstation edition.
-
New Steam Client Ups the Ante for Linux
The latest release from Steam has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve.
-
Gnome OS Transitioning Toward a General-Purpose Distro
If you're looking for the perfectly vanilla take on the Gnome desktop, Gnome OS might be for you.
-
Fedora 41 Released with New Features
If you're a Fedora fan or just looking for a Linux distribution to help you migrate from Windows, Fedora 41 might be just the ticket.