Here’s where the iPad has gotten me: I’m sitting with an old book in one hand and a utility knife in the other. My plan is to make the two meet, by cutting up the book and feeding the pages through a scanner.
The printed word has been shackled too long to paper, and I want to carry it around on my iPad tablet computer.
Cutting a book is hard, though. There’s a mental block to overcome. After a lifetime of valuing books, I find it difficult to destroy one, even to preserve it in digital form — particularly if it’s a hardback.
The iPad, as a fantastic replacement for paper, deserves only half the blame for putting me in this position. The other half goes to the Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500.
As I started thinking about scanning my documents and “going paperless,” I thought about the ideal scanner: It should take a pile of papers and scan both sides of each sheet, so I don’t have to feed them one by one.
It turns out that there aren’t many affordable, consumer-level scanners like that. But all we need is one good device, and the ScanSnap is it. If you can swallow the $430 price tag, it’s ideal. It goes through paper like a bonfire.
The ScanSnap is designed from the ground up to turn stacks of pulp to bytes. It doesn’t have the large glass bed of the conventional scanner or copy machine. Instead, it looks like a small inkjet printer, taking up only a bit more desk space than a lunch box. It has a 50-sheet holder and feeds each sheet between rollers while scanning both sides at the same time through two thin strips of glass.
It takes just 3 seconds for the ScanSnap to scan a sheet at a decent resolution. That compares with…