How to scan a book without cutting it

Cutting the spine gives a flatbed scanner a clean stack of sheets, but the book is gone afterwards. Library books, borrowed books, out-of-print editions and anything you want to keep or resell need a method that leaves them intact. A phone camera and page flattening are that method.

Place the phone directly above the open book, camera pointing straight down, so both pages fit in the frame. A stand, a stack of books or a shelf edge all work. Keep the distance fixed for the whole session — vFlat measures the page shape from that one viewpoint, and moving the phone means re-framing every time.

Even light from a window or a lamp to the side gives clean pages. A light behind you throws the shadow of the phone and your arm across the text, and a hard lamp above creates glare on glossy paper that no software can undo.

Two-page mode captures the whole spread and splits it into two ordered pages, so a 300-page book is 150 shots. Auto scan takes the picture when the page is still, so you only turn pages and hold them down. Hold the paper where it is comfortable; fingertips are removed from the scan.

Flip through the pages once to catch a shadow or a page that was not held flat, and retake those. Then export the whole book as one PDF and run text recognition on it, and the book you never cut becomes a searchable file.