51

I have access to several meters of manuals of various sorts around CP/M on PCs and various bits on mainframes. These are earmarked to go after decades of "cannot dump that" heartbleed. Most are originals, but also many copies. I helped to put some on eBay but nobody wanted them. What should I do?

Is there a postal address to which we can send several parcels?

Edit: Thank you for the suggestions. The problems with those have also been raised. The folks with these kinds of manuals in their attic/cellar are unlikely to happily invest a couple of 1000s of $/€/whatever to get those digitized. Skimming through those manuals one easily recognizes the cores/seeds of today's technologies, also the introductions are nice. But most striking are the touch and feel of some excellent quality folders, typically. Some come with leather. Others just just feel rock solid with nice colors and have wonderful separators for the chapters throwing your antique favorite technical keywords at you. You don't kill them, being digital or not. And I am afraid I would be in trouble for putting them up as a piece of craft and decoration at our place - but that is what they (often) are - both your mind and for your physical habitat.

Improve this question
6
  • 17
    Look at the list at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_museums if you have a museum nearby. In that case, contact them and ask if they are interested. Some of them scans old documents to make sure they are preserved.
    – UncleBod
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 14:51
  • 4
    You should save them. Punch cards are coming back, you know. This "USB drive" stuff is just a passing fad. :-)
    – Jay
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 18:35
  • The more pressing question: How to protect yourself from frivolous copyright infrigement harassment?
    – rackandboneman
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 19:25
  • 3
    You mean, assault any complainant with a monitor stand?
    – rackandboneman
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 21:02
  • 1
    @ChrisBouchard I'm already using old academic journals for monitor stands: my monitor doesn't need to be any higher!
    – Kaz
    Commented Aug 18, 2019 at 19:37

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
45

You could have a look on bitsavers.org. They catalogue and preserve computer manuals. If you have any unique manuals which are not yet catalogued on there, I am sure they would accept a scanned copy, but not in the form of dead trees.

Improve this answer
2
  • 29
    "I have a VERY large backlog of material to scan and don't actively sollicit material to work on." says the web page.
    – snips-n-snails
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 21:14
  • 5
    @snips-n-snails To clarify (I hope), Bitsavers is not actively soliciting paper items to scan. I think they'll still accept and archive PDFs. I contributed a scanned manual there as recently as 2015.
    – jeffB
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 18:37
32

First, check if the documents aren't already present on Bitsavers and Archive.org. If you do have something unique that hasn't been scanned yet, you can maybe try the new initiative announced today by Jason Scott aka @texfiles:

Announcing SCANTASTIX, a project that @KevinSavetz and I have whipped up to go after a class of what I call "Unadvocated Materials" and can be summarized as "If you have a few extra bucks, you can ensure neat stuff gets scanned and put on the Internet Archive".

...

If you saw how we did the Ted Nelson Junk Mail project, this would be similar. We take boxes of material, loose or bound, and scan it into digital form and store away the originals.

Alternatively, you can try a service like 1dollarscan.com (there may be others)

Improve this answer
5
  • 1
    I wonder how can 1dollarscan afford to provide scanning so cheap. Are there machines that scan books automatically? I cannot imagine a system that could turn pages of various books without many errors.
    – Tomáš Zato
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 12:35
  • 2
    @TomášZato Cut off the back and it's just a stack of paper. Hope it doesn't get stuck in the stack-scanner and there you go, 1 dollar.
    – Mast
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 16:10
  • 2
    @TomášZato I assume they cut off the spine and use sheet fed scanners (IIRC they mention somewhere that the books are destroyed during scanning). Note that the low price applies only to books with ISBN (probably they use it to not scan the same book twice); other materials are more expensive.
    – Igor Skochinsky
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 16:11
  • 3
    @TomášZato if you have money there’s also this: treventus.com/automatic-book-scanner-scanrobot.html
    – Igor Skochinsky
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 16:13
  • 2
    Here's a little bit about how Google does it.
    – Dennis Williamson
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 20:14
10

I'd get a nice sheetfed document scanner, cut off the spines, and feed in the manuals one at a time. Then upload to archive.org.

Improve this answer
4
  • 7
    The Internet Archive has services where you can donate books to them for them to scan.
    – forest
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 2:55
  • 3
    If you can find a proper industrial guillotine paper cutter (perhaps not as old as that one) you'll get a very clean cut and need not even remove the covers yourself. Most print shops that do binding will have one.
    – cjs
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 11:16
  • It's also not appreciated how difficult this actually is. It's a real hassle. A "nice sheetfeed document scanner" is not cheap. The local photocopy store charges more to scan documents than it does to copy them (over twice as much), and scanning can just flat out be finicky with jams, double feeds, etc. Add that to the idea of doing 1000's of pages and the headache adds up.
    – Will Hartung
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 23:28
  • I've not checked scanning prices at the copy shop lately, but almost all business-level photocopier/printer units these days will do scanning just as easily. If it's expensive at a copy shop, consider finding someone who works in an office with one of these and asking him to run the cut sheets through. It's no different from a photocopying job except that no paper is used.
    – cjs
    Commented Aug 19, 2019 at 8:23
7

Your options seem to be:

Additionally I'm sure that if you posted to the SDF bulletin board or somewhere on the tildes network that someone there would definitely be interested.

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    "Do nothing." and "Bin them." are also options.
    – Vince O'Sullivan
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 13:15
  • 5
    @VinceO'Sullivan no!
    – mirabilos
    Commented Aug 16, 2019 at 19:13

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .