Paperless Office?
I’ve been thinking about transitioning to a near-paperless office for a while now, and my upcoming move out of 650 has prompted a fresh wave of looking into this. I’m not yet ready to scan all of my books into PDF — the newest Sony eBook Reader doesn’t work well with PDFs; the Kindle can apparently convert them to its proprietary format, but can’t display images or equations (which I would need for my statistics and econometrics texts).
But I think I could at least start with the reference books that I look at less than once or twice a year. I also plan on scanning statements and financial documents and placing those on an encrypted SD card that will be kept separate from my laptop.
The sheet-fed scanner Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 gets pretty good reviews.
Any thoughts?
How many total pages are we talking about here? I was gonna suggest a bigger machine, but 18 ppm duplex is really impressive actually. But don’t forget that you’ll need to re-feed every 50 pages (I’m guessing?), or at least for every new document (so that it’s a separate PDF). And that’s the real hassle.
By the way, a shameless person would purchase it from Amazon, “try it out” for <30 days, and then return it if he is unhappy with its performance or decides he won’t use it as much as he thought he would.
According to the specs, 18 ppm (3 seconds/page) is at the lowest quality: 150 dpi color or 300 dpi b&w. But that’s actually not that bad. For reference, I print my color photographs for framing/presentation at 300 dpi.
But if that isn’t adequate quality, your scanning speed will slow considerably. (300 dpi color takes 10 seconds/page.)
I don’t understand how you’re going to scan your reference books. Are you planning to rip out the pages and send them through a document feeder? That’s going to take forever.
You might as well go all the way and beg/borrow/steal one of these as well (for the text books):
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-BDTS200-Table-Wheels/dp/B0012LZNXK
YOU STILL KEEP PAPER STATEMENTS AND FINANCIAL DOCUMENTS??????
You already know Fifty-Five and I use the Scansnap S300M. It’s AWESOME. These are absolutely amazing devices. For reference/storage purposes 150dpi (even 100dpi) is plenty sufficient.
Also if you are concerned with security, you can just create an encrypted folder on your hard drive. Putting stuff on an SD is just asking for trouble. Makes it that much easier to lose (or for Jack Bauer to steal).
@Look, 456pm– The ScanSnap comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat. So even if you can only scan in 50 pages at a time, you can merge the PDFs.
@Beef, 506pm– A friend of mine took his books to the HBS copy shop or Office Depot or some place like that and had them chop off the spines.
@Look, 510pm– Haha, you don’t even know. Because I didn’t have an elevator at my Cleveland apartment, things came up but did not come back down. So in addition to accumulating 7 years of magazines and medical journals, I also accumulated 7 years of credit card statements, utilities, etc. When I was moving out, I could just throw out the magazines and journals in the trash. But I spent nearly a full month shredding the sensitive documents in a 7-page capacity Staples shredder. (When I consider how much time I spent feeding 7 pages at a time into that thing, I probably should have just spent the money for a more appropriate shredder.)
Last week, I took advantage of CashBack’s Scansnap to capture all my tax documents since 1998. I also realized, much to my chargrin, that I too had a lot of financial documents filed away. So spent a couple days shredding on a 6-page shredder.