Maintenance engineer at my work wants to digitize his old technical manuals into OCR'd PDFs. He says he's looked for these manuals online but they don't exist, so that option is out. I have a ScanSnap document scanner that does great with this, but it can't take his technical manuals because some are oversized and some are bound. I can't do much about the oversized aspect but I told him if he wants to cut the binding off, I can run the pages through the ScanSnap for him.
He didn't like this idea so I'm wondering if anyone has a suggestion for hardware to handle this. I've worked with nice book scanners like Zeutschels in the past, which can take all sizes and of course facilitate fast page-turning, etc. -- but don't have access to one here (nor the budget). Anyone have a recommendation for something maybe $500 or less that could handle this type of scanning? Thanks for any help