Genealogists love to scan books and other old documents. Many of the books we scan are old, out of print, and sometimes fragile. Handling these documents requires techniques and perhaps hardware not needed with the scanning of modern books. If you contact most any book scanning service and ask them how they scan the books, most will reply, "First we cut off the bindings and then..."
You won't be doing that with any of my valuable books!
If you scan a book with a normal, inexpensive flatbed scanner such as those normally sold at local computer stores, you will probably either need to cut the binding or else you will end up with images that have "page curl" near the binding. The printed characters near the center of the book may be difficult or even impossible to read. Here is an example of pages from a bound book scanned with a normal (inexpensive) scanner:
Most genealogists will want a solution that results in pages being scanned evenly across the page, such as this example:
There are three possible solutions:
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