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Portable Scanner Solutions for Research?
Fished asks: "Lately, I'm finding that I need to do a lot of research in Libraries -- remember those? I'm tired of feeding dimes to the copiers, and would like to buy some kind of portable scanner to go with my Powerbook. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find one that will work. Back in the eighties, this were as common as dirt: they were small, four inch wide scanners that you could run over the page. Also, while I've found three portable scanners for PC's (from Antec and Pentax) even if I could somehow get them to work with Mac OS X, they are sheet-fed, which is useless for scanning pages out of books. Does anyone still make the old-fashioned Hand Scanners, and do they make them for Macs?"
Logitech use to make them. I am not sure if they still do (doubt it). It was black and white and about 6in wide. I never really liked it much, the software sucked at combining multiple swipes into one fluid page. It was TWAIN compatible. If you do manage to find one, I am sure it will run on the linux distro that I know you have on your Mac :)
Handheld scanners were useless for scanning books. Most books are too wide for a handheld scanner and you have to stitch together your scans - a VERY awkward process. And even if you can scan the whole width of the page, the roller used to detect when the scanner was moving would go off the bottom of the page of the book before you scanned the final line of text!
In short - forget about the handheld scanner idea. They do sell line scanners that read in lines of text at a time if you just need short segments. I suppose you could even take pictures of the pages with the new high megapixel digital cameras.
I have to second this fine person's suggestion for a Powershot A40. My sister recently invested in one and I have personally used this camera. It is very easy to use and just about any picture you take will come out magnificently, regardless of how skilled you are in photography. For a digital camera, the pictures are of very high quality. Even my camera, which is about six times the price, won't take pictures this nice unless you really understand film types, lighting situations and exposure settings. Just my two cents on this matter.