Hi, Maithe. I'm glad you're asking questions here, and welcome to the list. What kind of scanner and scanning software do you have? Is it the actual scanning or the proofreading afterward that seems to take such a long time for you? Knowing that will help us give you a better answer. There are some time-saving techniques you can use with either Kurzweil or Openbook. I don't want to create confusion by explaining features of a program you don't work with though.
Though it doesn't change the actual scanning time, I do my scanning in combination with another activity. My favorite is to call up a friend and chat while I scan. My friend Laura Ann and I get on the phone, and we both start scanning. An hour later, we each have a book scanned, and we've had fun laughing and talking together. I also listen to audiobooks, play music, help my daughter with her homework, or scan while I'm on hold as I'm handling calls for my dad's business. Sometimes I do 10 or 15 pages, go off to do something in the kitchen, and come back to do a few more pages while dinner is baking in the oven. I guess I'm saying that I try to make scanning easy for myself and make it part of fun things that I actually want to do.
For people who don't have the time to scan books, some scanner manufacturers make an automatic document feeder that you can attach to your scanner. You can cut the spine off your book and put the pages in the document feeder. It will feed each page through to the scanner and puts it into another tray. Then you can run the pages through again so the scanner can scan the back sides of the pages. After this process is finished, your scanning program will colate the pages for you, giving you a nice, orderly book with minimum effort on your part. There are even some scanners where the document feeder can scan both sides of the pages in one pass, saving you even more time. These gadgets are more expensive though, so there is a down side. If I ever win the lottery, I want one of these babies. (grin)
I hope some of this will be useful to you. Once we know which scanning software you use, I'm sure we can help you cut back on your scanning time while keeping accuracy levels high. Again, welcome to the list.
Monica Willyard maithe007 wrote:
Hi!I am new here, but have been with Bookshare for two years now. I literally have hundreds of books to scan, but find that it takes me too long to scan just one book. Is there a faster way for me to do it? It could be that my scanner is too slow or that I am not doing this right. My scans are pretty good....most of it is clear and concise. Please let me know how I can do this in a faster manner. Thanks a bunch, Maithemaithe007@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:maithe007@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
