I recently acquired a copy of the 4-volume Windows CE developers kit book set (+CD) from Microsoft Press. It's like 1400 pages of Windows CE documentation!
Sadly the box has mold damage and the books have a smell that I won't ever get out. The pages look perfectly fine though.
So my thought was, it would probably be best to run these through a book scanner and preserve this box set on the internet archive.
My question: Does anyone have the possibility to use a book scanner or know places in the Netherlands or EU where I can do this for a reasonable price?
If you are willing to destroy the book by de-binding it. Then you just need to heat the pages off of the glue binding (assuming it is a glue binding) and then can run them through a photo copier. It can be messy though.
There are archival services, but they won't be cheap!
I'm curious, what's on the CD?
Also, non-destructive book scanning is inherently just kind of slow. I remember seeing some library somewhere had a setup with scanners in a /\ shape so you just laid the book on, hit scan, then turned the page, hit scan, repeat, but I dunno if anything like that is available for personal use (or if it's even like a product and not some custom one-off unit).
As said, the book is smelly (which is why it's standing outside), it was both in a smoky and moldy environment I guess. The pages are perfectly fine though, optically the books are in very good condition.
Either way, destructive scanning would be no issue for me. I'd rather have them preserved that way.
I also reached out to John K on Twitter, who you might know from Sticky Software titles. He went on to work in the Windows documentation team, so I asked him whether he knew of a way to get digital versions of these books, maybe I'll get lucky.
The CD came with some help files, the installer for the HPC/Pro SDK and code samples. Since the code samples are the most interesting thing, I have uploaded them to GitHub
