Scanning cookbooks without cutting pages

[gdavidhizar 0]

I have an extensive collection of cookbooks in our motorhome. In the interest of saving space I am thinking of scanning them into evernote. I would like to keep the books intact. Any suggestions? 

[DTLow 5,736]

2 hours ago, gdavidhizar said:

I have an extensive collection of cookbooks in our motorhome. In the interest of saving space I am thinking of scanning them into evernote. I would like to keep the books intact. Any suggestions? 

Do you have access to scanning equipment, or are you using a mobile device camera?        
Either will work.
For a lot of mobile device scanning, a stand would help.

I would want my scans to be PDF format.

For searching, EN will do OCR, or you may decide to do your own (Paid feature in EN)

Think about doing separate recipe scans vs entire book scans.  
Separate scans might be more useful, and easier to manage.

My preference would be to use tags instead of notebooks, multipe tags
for example tag: Chicken Recipes, tag: Caseroles
You could use a tag to collect the separate scans into a book view
for example tag: Cookbook xxx

[CalS 5,280]

3 hours ago, gdavidhizar said:

I have an extensive collection of cookbooks in our motorhome. In the interest of saving space I am thinking of scanning them into evernote. I would like to keep the books intact. Any suggestions? 

The EN scannable app on a phone will let you create PDFs by page.  That or a flat bed scanner.  Either will take some time.  

You can use a PDF editor to merge the pages into one PDF to represent the book if you like.  Though in my opinion, better to create a tag for the book and apply it to all recipes/notes from the book.  Dealing with search results would be easier.  

[Sayre Ambrosio 520]

4 hours ago, gdavidhizar said:

I have an extensive collection of cookbooks in our motorhome. In the interest of saving space I am thinking of scanning them into evernote. I would like to keep the books intact. Any suggestions? 

I use a dedicated cooking software called Cook'n for all my cookbook collections. After I get them into that I export the digital cookbooks as PDF and stick them in Evernote as a backup and for sharing purposes. They have a mobile app but I prefer doing it this way and it seems to work a bit better for sharing while books. 

[gazumped 11,652]

I agree with all of the above.  One extra suggestion - check out your various cookbooks online.  Depending on how old / how popular they are you may be able to find some ebook versions or even some publicly available scans.  It would be worth spending a few dollars on an ebook to avoid a long backbreaking process of scanning each page.  Check online too for book copying stands - you'll need good lighting and the correct camera angle (ie 90degs from the page) to get good OCR results.  Good luck with your project!

[CalS 5,280]

@gdavidhizar

Update on Scannable.  I have always used Scannable in single page mode.  I had the need to digitize a notebook today and used Scannable.  It turns out you can take a picture, turn a page, take a picture, turn a page...with Scannable, so not as time consuming as I first thought.  It took a minute or so for 12 pictures (2 pages per picture).  Just have to be sure and save to PDF, and probably do it in small batches, 10 to 20 pictures at a time.

OTOH, I'm with @gazumped, if you can find a downloadable version of the cookbook that would be the least painful path.

[Candid 167]

Also, scanning even if super fast is tedious work. So I would go through the cookbooks and flag the recipes I actually use and only scan those.

[Candid 167]

On 8/7/2016 at 3:02 PM, Sayre Ambrosio said:

I use a dedicated cooking software called Cook'n for all my cookbook collections. After I get them into that I export the digital cookbooks as PDF and stick them in Evernote as a backup and for sharing purposes. They have a mobile app but I prefer doing it this way and it seems to work a bit better for sharing while books. 

Can you talk about how well this software handles a variety of formats: especially Changes like multi-column pages.

[Sayre Ambrosio 520]

On 8/13/2016 at 9:46 AM, Candid said:

Can you talk about how well this software handles a variety of formats: especially Changes like multi-column pages.

The iPad app captures multiple column pages easier than the desktop version. Here's a link to the website http://www.dvo.com I highly suggest looking at YouTube as well as there are ore videos that walk you through things there. I will let you know that they have gone to a tiered system like EN has for pricing. I'm a premium users and always have been so I don't know what the limitations are on the free or lower tiers.

In my experience columed receipies can be a PITA to import. What I usually do is just look in their live feed and capture it fresh rather than import the one I have. That's actually what I am doing with my recipe notebook in EN as we speak.

You can import from almost any website that you find, Pinterest, all that good stuff.