US Options For Mail To Australia ?

Postmaster,
I'll email you off forum.
Jim offered me the same service
I just don't want friends to be caught up in something
that goes haywire.

I have dealt with you prior, so I'll send you my invoice
and you can take a read of it, and form your own opinion.

The weird freight option and credit card had me suspicious.
$3 a Volume is an absolute BARGAIN.
It would be hard to miss.

Thanks for the offer.
I am good for anything up to $1,000 but nothing more.

PS: Going by Alicia's est of 4lbs x 10 parcels, that's 18Kg not 5Kg

How about splitting the cost of books+shipping somehow and mailing them to some volunteer you trust in the States and who would be willing to credit card this? That co-owner would keep the books and scan them and send the scans to you, perhaps what you intended all along. Billigs might go better as PDFs by article anyway.

I am also slightly suspicious of the offer at $3 a volume. These are on Amazon books as individual volumes so expected prices should be known. You should ask about general condition. Mildew I can deal with, but not flood damage.

HB
all is moving along, OK Thanks, I'll keep you posted
35 Billigs books would be too much to OCR

All sorted ! Thanks to everyone involved.
I have my Billigs

Special mention to SCF member Brett, (BmBmBm)
who directed me to the Library involved.

and to all others, you know who you are

Heartfelt thanks
I am indebted.

Well done Rod.

I know how much you've wanted a set of the Billigs books

Should keep you busy for a while!

Congratulations! Persistence pays off.

As to my remark about scanning, we've had other posts here about book scanners, which are admittedly not for everyone. But they do allow fast work. And I have a lot of notes, clippings, photocopies,pamphlets, etc. that I want to convert to electronic media so I've been looking at book scanners recently. The high-end ones are pretty whizzy but out of reach for me. Refurbished ones might fit the budget. The cheaper and portable ones around US$150 have some great software features, but the cheap ones all have trouble with perfect OCR due to the inside page curvature of tightly bound books, not a problem for what I want to do. Some have timers or foot pedals to move things along, many scan A3 paper so that speeds things up even more.

Thanks Bobby





Yes! I have desired one for years, but way out of my pocket.

Goodness knows what I would do if I had one,
I did a backup of my Stamp images last evening (3 hrs)

In the past 12 months (exactly) my stamp images have grown by 17,000
and an extra 400 or so, folders.

Of course, a lot of those images are lifts from books and catalogues,
doubling up with "Optimiser" images,
But I would say I have run 10,000 through PostmasterGS "Stampfix"

Book scanner.....$400 rough estimate, 1000 pages per hour

Quantity survey, and how to build it
https://diybookscanner.org/forum/vi...?f=14&t=2914

Very nicely done and I like the V-shaped cradle. The high-end ones I'm talking about run $US450-500 and shoot books on a flat surface. It's the software for those that's the important and amazing part. It is WYSIWYG, and your laptop displays a virtual centerline to align the book. Special clips are provided to hold the open pages as flat as possible -and software removes those clips from the image. The high end ones have the ability to unbend curvature on the inside of thicker books and so allow OCR to work. Apparently has autoconversion to OCR also.

If you're talking about the CZUR machines (and silimar), beware. They don't work nearly as well as advertised on books that have any stiffness in the spine. Worst tech purchase I've made in my 47 years.

I still use a Plustek OpticBook flatbed book scanner for non-destructive scanning. It works really well, though it's a time-consuming process.

For destructive scanning, like my yearly Michel catalogs, I cut the catalogs apart using an Xacto, trim the spine glue off using a Dahle rotary trimmer, and run the pages through a ScanSnap high-speed document scanner. Start to finish it takes about 3-4 hours to do a complete catalog. The total setup wasn't cheap, but for what I used to pay every year to have catalogs and other references "professionally" scanned by a book scanner, it'll pay for itself within the first year (and the quality of the end product is better).