On 22 Aug 2007, at 15:09, Chris M wrote: Although I can't say I've had the experience, "scanning" hundreds of pages with a digital camera sounds somewhat demanding & time- consuming for someone who is demonstrating their interest in the material by throwing it away!! Lots of decent "multifuction" inkjet printers these days have a page- feeder and can be left scanning to produce a big series of .tiff files or a pdf or whatever. In finding a scanning-printer that has this feature the emphasis is on *decent* - you'd probably pay ?200 (or I guess maybe $300??) for a Canon or HP with a page-feeder. I can imagine that many folks on this list prefer to buy laser-printers or their scanners as separate units, but nevertheless inkjets are much more suitable for photographic oputput, and the wife will find an MFC more convenient for photocopying her recipes / knitting patterns / $other_chauvinist_stereotype - the high-end models with sheet-feeders are the ones that folks like us will buy if resorting to an inkjet MFC. I'd have thought that one of these would produce MUCH better output than a digital camera, so if anyone does have manuals to dispose of that they'd like to rip first then I'd suggest finding an acquaintance who already has such a printer. Book-bound manuals may need slicing apart with a stanley knife, spiral-bound manuals may be easier to open apart, but this will surely not take long and is the most labour-intensive part of the operation if you have a proper sheet-feed scanner. Stroller.

my sis found a page cutter in a dumpster LOL. She gave it to me for nothing. Dumpster diving is kewell :). I managed to slice and dice a textbook in under 5 minutes. Scanning it is yet to be done though. You often have to consider the increased accessibility (and availabilty) of an electronic version of something when contemplating the time needed to transform it into digital info. I don't know, a typical textbook could take 80 hours to consume (by yer head). An extra hour or so of work to make it storable in byts and bytes is well worth it IMHO. --- Jason T <silent700 at gmail.com> wrote: ____________________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search that gives answers, not web links. http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobileweb/onesearch?refer=1ONXIC