Photomyne as a Downsizing Tool

I'm in my mid-60s, and after a lifetime of collecting books, my house is full of them. So I'm trying to reduce the size of my library. It's part of a desire (and a need) to downsize my entire collection of worldly possessions.

I've been looking through the old school textbooks that I've gathered over the years. I like them because of the insight they give about life in former times and I've collected them for that reason.

To help me let some of the old school books go, I installed an app called Photomyne on my smart phone. With the app, the camera on your phone acts as a scanner, so you can capture any printed image. The basic version is free, and the pro version costs 99¢ per month. I went pro because it allows you to store your images online (if you want) instead of filling up your phone with them. The scanned images upload automatically to the Photomyne website, and then I can download them to my desktop computer.

The Photomyne people mostly talk about using their app to scan loose snapshots or in pages in photo albums. But I have been using it to scan some pages.from my old school books. It works fairly well. I'm pleased enough with it that I've now scanned parts of four textbooks. After capturing what I want to save from them, I am now OK now giving three of those books away. I'm going to keep the fourth one.

If I keep working at the rate of one book every day or two, and my discard ratio holds true, I should see a bit of empty bookshelf space soon. That would be a good thing.

Here are a few images from one of the books I am letting go (Healthy Living Book 2, by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, Dr. P.H. Published in 1924 by Charles E. Merrill Company.) These scans are exactly as the Photomyne app produced them.

Switchboard operator

Some of the images have some arcing of the straight lines.  That's because the pages of the book were not lying perfectly flat. I believe it would be a problem when scanning from a book in an ordinary flat-bed scanner too. I could try to fix the distortion with imaging software, if it really bothered me. (I use Paintshop Pro, but Photoshop, Gimp, and many other programs would do the job, too.)

Bacteriology lab equipment of 1920s

All of these images were small pictures on the pages of a small book, but the app did a good job of enlarging them, in my opinion.

Alcohol content of a popular patent
medicine compared to various liquors