what is the best method of scan/printing books?

<p>Does anyone know the fast way to scan/print textbooks? im planning on bringing a laser printer the week before school starts and i dont know how long it would take me. Even if i can save some money i'm willing to do it.</p>

<p>LIke i said, Kinko's will cut your book binding (so you can have the pages all loose) for $1.50. The Student Technology Center (across from covel commons) has a Xerox machine that automatically scans up to 150 pages as a PDF.</p>

<p>would i be able to return the books...?</p>

<p>ummm no you cut the book binding...</p>

<p>Although I wouldn't bother with the hassle of photocopying, if I had to do this, I would photograph my book with a digital camera. Obviously if you love to have the material in your hand or lack a laptop for lectures, you wouldn't do this. You don't have to pay for paper, copies, etc.</p>

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LIke i said, Kinko's will cut your book binding (so you can have the pages all loose) for $1.50. The Student Technology Center (across from covel commons) has a Xerox machine that automatically scans up to 150 pages as a PDF.

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<p>I think the solution is just straight copying of the book and then possibly binding it.</p>

<p>Is cutting the book binding popular? I'm not sure why people like to transform textbooks to electronic sources of material.</p>

<p>I do what you do Altema. I once had to read a 50'ish page story from a textbook at school but goofed off. So I took pictures of all the pages and ended up reading all 50 pages on my 2.5" screen on my camera. Hahaha. This isn't such a good idea if you want to print out the pages though, since you'll be wasting ink cause the printer will print a shade of color on the paper because photograph isn't pure black text/white background. I have this software, forgot the name of it but I can look it up if you are interested, that came with my scanner that can detect text though. So what you could do is take a bunch of pictures of the textbooks you needed and then run it through the software to capture all the text in a pure text format. It works with scans and should work with pictures from digital cameras too if the text isn't too distorted. Captures most normal fonts but none of those crazy fancy cursive stuff. </p>

<p>Just wondering, does doing any of this break any copyright laws?</p>

<p>if you're copying it then returning the book or selling the book then yes, obviously. if you still own the book but just want to scan it so you can have it on your laptop or something instead of lugging the book around then i think its ok? :confused:</p>

<p>i'd assume its like ripping a CD to mp3. if you own the CD its fine. you can rip it and put the files on your ipod or whatever. but if you rip a CD you dont own its considered piracy.</p>

<p>Oh, I have a tablet PC. So it's much more convenient for me. I just put everything on my computer as a PDF. </p>

<p>Yea, if it's for your own personal use, then it's okay. But, if nobody finds out...<em>shrug</em></p>

<p>A really drastic way is break the binding on the book and use the scanner in the powell library. The scanner they have will automatically scan a stack of papers put into the feed and e-mail it to you in pdf. It's basically a superfast fax machine.</p>

<p>Edit: Just noticed that Jinobi suggested the same thing</p>

<p>lets just say...i dont want to purchase the books...</p>

<p>Does it cost anything to use the scanning machine at powell? Seems like it could come in real handy.</p>

<p>Is there any real way to avoid paying for books? Scanning books without breaking the bindings tend to lose a lot of the information in the middle if you are not totally bending the book to the point of breaking the binding. </p>

<p>You could break the binding, but then... yeah.</p>

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Does it cost anything to use the scanning machine at powell?

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<p>Free, it's at CLICC.</p>

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Is there any real way to avoid paying for books?

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You can check out books on reserve for 2 hours. If you don't like any of these solutions, too bad, you will have to face paying $$ for books. Thousands of students are facing this crisis too.</p>

<p>You can borrow too.</p>

<p>Yeah, I guess I sort of meant my question to be rhetoric. I don't think there's any comfortable way to avoid paying books.</p>

<p>Well, a solution is to sell the textbook if you don't need it. You can usually sell about 75-125% of value that you bought it for, as long as the edition changes.</p>

<p>say that we buy textbooks from some other websites ie. amazon or half.com; can we resell the books at the ucla bookstore?</p>

<p>yes, but usually they really low ball you. you'd most likely get more money by selling online, on bruinwalk, or to textbooks plus. but still check with them since there are a few times they've given me the going online price or more.</p>

<p>Good luck with not paying for textbooks but still wanting to have it in your possession. Otherwise, use the reserves. I mean, seriously, no one said that higher education, especially at a university, isn't going to be expensive. Gotta put the money down for any investment like everyone else on this planet.</p>

<p>It's just messed up to copy a new book and return it back, even putting the legality of it aside.</p>

<p>Now, jinobi, excellent idea. Where's this sheet-feeding scanner at Powell you speak of?</p>

<p>I actually use the one at STC (which I think, for some reason, is called the Covel Business Center nowadays). It's a big Xerox machine, to the right of the front desk. On the touchscreen, there's an option for you to e-mail the scanned images as individual jpg/tiff files, or as one big PDF.</p>