: Re: Destructive scanning: Sanding down spine better than band saw? (I hope it's on-topic - I saw a couple of other questions about scanning books to make ebooks) I want to destructively scan my

@Debbie

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I have now started successfully scanning books and my experience is that you should get a guillotine paper cutter.

I made a clamp and tried to remove the spine by sanding or planing it down, but it was a mess. Manually cutting through the stack close to the binding is also slow and tricky.

But it's fast and easy to separate the book into 5mm stacks using a standard retractable utility knife and then cut the remaining parts of the binding off those stacks with a 0 paper guillotine - this is the kind of machine that lowers the blade horizontally instead of around one fixed axis and provides better cuts for deep stacks.

The best method to manually cut the book into stacks is to either lay the book onto its back, force it open as much as possible and cut between the pages as directly into the spine as possible, or to stand the book upright, open it 180 degrees and cut down with the knife. In my experience the latter method guides the knife better, but if you do cut into the pages anyway, then you tend to rip them (potentially even into the text). For the former method you need to steer the knife for yourself, but if you get off course you still get a clean cut and don't risk ripping the paper.

The paper stacks produced by this method haven't jammed the automatic document feed of my scanner once in 2000 pages scanned so far. I reckon it takes about 20s per 50 sheets (100 pages), not including time the scanner works on its own.

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