By Luke Turcotte, from HackCollege.
eBook readers are quickly becoming the go-to method to read print media. Perhaps the most exciting advantage is the ability to carry thousands of books on a thin device. Yes students, this means you could condense a semesters worth of heavy textbooks into a few thousand bytes on your Kindle, Nook or iPad. Textbook publishers are charging forward through this new frontier of media distribution, but unfortunately only a small portion of textbooks are available for download today. What do you do if your microbiology text isn't available in a digital format this fall?
Getty File Photo
Option #1: Textbook Scanning Services
There are several online services that will scan a textbook and return a PDF document of its contents. BlueLeaf appears to be the the front-runner in this game, charging $0.06 per page for destructive scanning and $0.09 for non-destructive scanning in addition to a fee per book of $12.95 and $24.95 respectively. To ease the gouging, BlueLeaf will scan your first 50 pages for free. Full color scans are an additional $12, and if you're gullible enough to have them convert the PDF to a PRC or ePub file it'll cost you another $12 (this can be accomplished for free with Calibre).
To give you a better idea of pricing, to scan three textbooks totaling 1956 pages for this upcoming semester, non-destructive scanning in color would cost me $218.
Option #2: Build a Book Scanner
Diybookscanner.org is an awesome project offering community-designed blueprints for making your own non-destructive book scanner. Once built, these scanners take pictures of each page of the book you wish to digitize using two tethered cameras. The cost of the hardware is the greatest downfall to this method, although if you want to keep your textbook intact this is the way to go.
Option #3: Chop & Scan
If you're comfortable with cutting up a textbook, running the pages through a scanner with an automatic document feeder is by far the cheapest method to digitze a textbook. Here's how to do it:
Step 1: Each textbook is bound a little differently. Your goal is to dissect the book so that you have several booklets of pages.
Step 2: Cut the booklets along the left margin to obtain single pages. This is easily accomplished with a paper cutter.
Step 3: Insert the pages into the document feeder of your scanner. Scan the fronts of all the pages and save as a PDF, then flip and scan the backs.
Step 4: Download and install PDFsam, a free multi-platform PDF tool. Load the front and back PDF files into the Alternate Mix plugin, which will combine the two files and place the pages into the proper order.
Step 5: Convert the PDF scan of your book into a format your eBook reader can read using Calibre.
Each method varies in cost and effort required. At the end of the day, the convenience of reading textbooks on your computer at home, eBook reader on campus, or your smartphone while waiting for the bus is well worth it.
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i'd just get the ebook if it were available. otherwise, internet.. depending on subject, should be some online. like english, a lot of world lit and most lit is public domain work.
anyway, weird article.
i'm not particularly interested in saving my peers money by shaving my books for them. how silly. again pointless article. it'd be far easier and less time consuming to copy, print and sell chapters to peers.
I've used a few, and they had columns. I think that is a bad idea just because you're continuously scrolling up and down on the same page if you're searching for something.
Also, how long can you stare at a computer screen?
Don't forget when you purchase a textbook you can resell it yourself (usually) so the overall cost is not as great. But when you purchase the ebook, thats the price you pay and never make it back. So technically it doesn't always save you money.
If you are just scanning a book by cutting the pages out -- I can most certainly see why you hate eBooks. The eBook experience will begin to get better as publishers begin to produce eBooks. They can "build" an eBook with text, audio, images and video. This will most certainly improve your experience.
The formatting is also really annoying. Maybe it was just program I was using, it was designed as a regular book and just turned into an ebook. They need to be designed from the very beginning as ebooks, but still, not sure if I'd ever enjoy them.
I stopped buying books after freshman year :|
I just looked at the syllabus and based on that, I copied the chapters I'd need for the whole semester...That's a lot better than an eTextbook!
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Screen-ReadingPrint/8551/
I have the sense that I remember better when I read print, but that could be a function of the environment and the method of usage (I tend to jump from topic to topic when using screen media).
For literature and reading assignments the ebooks work fine.
For scientific detailed diagrams (BIO) the ebooks resolution are not fine enough.
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How nice would it be to have all your books in your tablet/laptop and not have to hoof around all that weight.
Not to mention we can update outdated facts on a yearly basis, stop cutting down trees for paper, and highlighting and notes would be so much easier.
I can hear the publishers now "That will be great for our kids, but there is no way we will damage our profit margins just to educate people."
Just make sure they are encrypted so the freaks in Texas cannot change them at will. :-)
Want to know more? Niles Township High Schools, Skokie, IL
Attendance alone is a big part of the grade.
Homework can be copied.
Downloaded presentation can be 25% of the grade.
If someone in another country than the US download or scans a textbook and sells it for cheap - will that affect tuition longer term?