Time for something less strenuous

A lot of what I do demands a fair bit of concentration.  When I get home at the weekend, I don’t always find myself able to concentrate that much.  This is one reason why my additions to the Early Fathers collection developed; scanning and proofing texts does not require a lot of concentration, and can be quite soothing.

Like most of us, I have books and articles in photocopy form sitting around.  Since I acquired the Fujitsu Scansnap S300, these have looked increasingly inconvenient.

And I hate “inconvenient.”

Well, it’s not that hard to stick one of these books-in-a-pile-of-photocopies through the Scansnap S300.  I’ve just scanned one, which I will need sometime but not now.  It created a PDF.  I then opened the PDF in Abbyy Finereader 9, and ran the text recognition on it.  Then I saved it again, as a searchable PDF.  The latter isn’t as good quality as the first PDF, for some mysterious reason, so I’ll keep both. 

So… I now have a pile of paper to throw away.  If I ever need the book in that form, I can just print off the PDF.

Books that I use all the time are a different matter.  Books that I read through with a glass of something by my side are a different matter.  But books I never look at, and which I retain a copy of because of some idea I may one day work on?  I think not.

I doubt I am alone in this.  All over the world, students must be doing the same with textbooks.

 

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