I have some old books now falling to bits: what is the best way to digitalize them into DEVONthink 3

I have to say, I had no idea one could do so many in a day. Useful to know I guess. I think the day might come when I pull back on one or two shelves of books I have. This may be the way to do it.

I think 20 or so is what I can reasonably do in a day without spending any extra time on it. It’s just feeding paper, really, while doing other work. If you were serious about working through hundreds on a weekend or something, it’d be doable.

And, once everything is digitized, then the fun begins, because everything is indexed by Spotlight and DEVONthink, making it easy to find every mention of X in every book, for example. Link those things up with wikilinks, replicants, or links to individual pages in PDFs and you have a really powerful resource for a researcher—your own Google Books library. Of course Google is generally more accurate, and there are other caveats, but it is a useful even with its drawbacks.

By the way, I recommend EasyFind for searches. This is a free DEVON technologies app that doesn’t get enough attention, I think. Much like DT, I rely on it every day.

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I didn’t even know about EasyFind. I use Houdah Spot and it is amazing. I do sometimes continue to use an app I really like to support it in fact.
Thanks, reduction of my library would do for me, good to know how easy relatively it would be. FYI, just interest; I am making a kind of three season study by converting my garage, which is a nice woooden framed structure in my yard really. In Pennsylvania it can get moist and if I can avoid putting more bookcases in there it might save me a lot of trouble.
So to digitalize one or two bookcases would make a big step in that direction, I could have a kind of rolling selection out there, or none at all. As it is my inside study is really full, one or two slow additions over the next years could easily be achieved by some quite limited digitalization.

Really I only started this thread with my very particular need, quite idiosyncratic. A few pages I need to reflect on deeply sometimes, almost as an aide memoire, sometimes mathematical papers of quite short length, or even a page or two about something I need to think deeply about or takes me time to understand. Some of them being in fragile collected papers type volumes, they won’t take heavy use any more.
Putting those few pages in DEVONthink 3 favorites is amazingly useful as I can see it on my iPhone then. I don’t ‘work’ as such on iPhone but do now read and listen to lectures still on it. It is easy to go back to them at a touch so to speak. It is only recently I have found these hidden fluencies in the app. Hope this isn’t too long…