Pro tip: skip the fancy book scanner and just use your phone camera like I finally learned after wasting $80

Bought one of those handheld book scanners off eBay for $80 thinking it would save me time digitizing my thrift store finds, but the thing jammed on every other page and the text came out blurry, so now I just take photos with my phone on a stack of old textbooks in natural light - has anyone else fallen for a gadget like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

jason739d agoMost Upvoted

Bought a fancy label maker once, spent two hours peeling stickers off everything before realizing my phone notes worked fine.

paul_lane808d ago

What kind of settings do you use on your phone to get the text sharp? I found that turning off the auto flash and propping the phone up on a couple of spare textbooks makes a huge difference. Natural light from a window works way better than any lamp I tried, plus I use a free scanning app that straightens out the page edges for me. That $80 gadget sounds like a total pain, I remember buying one of those handheld scanners from a thrift store and it shredded a rare copy of a gardening book I had. Now I just snap photos, crop them fast, and save them as PDFs right on my phone.