Debinding

From Retromags

Debinding 101

Debinding is the ancient art of setting free the binded pages of book or magazine for easier scanning. The techniques I will show you have been passed down from generation to generation. Ok enough jokes, Debinding a magazine offers you some pros and cons,

Pro's

• Its faster to scan.
• Its easier to scan.
• It allows you to scan more of the magazine.

Con's

• The magazine becomes worthless after debinding.
• The pages can become out of order.

So lets look at the Pro's first. When you debind a magazine you can generally scan it easier/faster because it can be fed through a ADF (Automatic Document Feeder). You can simply load in 30-50 pages at a time and the scanner will do all the work, while you are free to do other things. The other main reason for debinding a magazine is to produce a fuller scan. When a magazine is placed on a flatbed scanner, the magazine rises up near the binding of the magazine. This pulls the image away from the scanner and doesn't allow for a clean scan. When you scan a magazine without debinding it, you will generally lose about 1/4 of an inch of the page. While this doesn't sound like a lot, Most video game magazines have artwork or screen shots that span across two or more pages. When these images are scanned they wont match up as nicely when viewing the magazine in digital format.

Now lets look at the Con's of debinding. The most obvious thing is that when you debind the magazine loses all its value. The option of debinding a magazine is best left to someone who plans to trash there magazines anyway. Debinding is a perfect solution for someone who is tight on space and is looking to get rid of there magazines, and decides that they will scan them into digital format and then throw away the physical copies. The other Con of debinding a magazine is that a lot of video game magazines do not have page numbers on all the pages. It sounds silly until you actually debind a magazine and the pages get out of order. Usually pages that have advertisements on them don't carry a page number. You would think this wouldnt be a problem since each page has 2 sides. Surely one of those sides must have a page number? Well unfortunately thats not true. A lot of video game magazines have pages that do not have page numbers on either side. This doesnt become a problem until the actual scanning! Your standard piece of white paper is usually thicker then a magazine page and rougher, Since a magazine page is thinner and smoother then a standard piece of white paper, sometimes the ADF picks up 2 pages. If the scanner does pick up multiple pages, they will be out of order when it places those pages in the output tray.

The best practice the following. Before debinding an issue, you will want to flip through it and write down any pages that have no page numbers on either side. So if you are about to debind a 200 page Nintendo Power. You should have something like this

• Page 54 = Mario 3 Ad
• Page 55 = Megaman 2 Ad
• Page 109 = Spider Man Ad
• Page 110 = Classified Corner
• etc

Writing down any pages that dont have page numbers on either side may sound tedious, But when they get out of order you can put them back in order in a matter of minutes.

Tools of the Trade

The tools you will need to debind a magazine are as follows...

• Sturdy Surface ($7)
• Box Cutter ($2)
• Ruler ($2)
• Magazines
• Optional Plastic Cutting Board ($2)
• Optional Binder Clips ($2)

The first thing you will need is a sturdy surface to cut the magazines on, I use a wooden tray table from Walmart. The next thing you will need is a box cutter and a ruler, Box cutters can be bought from your local CVS, Walgreens or Home Depot. The ruler I bought was an all metal ruler. I would stay clear of plastic rulers and if you are going to get a wooden ruler, I would suggest one with a metal edge, so that the blade doesn't cut away the wood.

You should always cut on a hard flat surface. It may be tempting to try to protect the surface you are cutting on with a piece of cardboard. But cardboard is too forgiving! Once you start getting toward the end of the magazine, the blade will start cutting into the cardboard and can alter your straight line. If you want to protect the tray table from cut marks, I suggest buying a plastic cutting board to cut on.

You may also want to buy some binder clips, This helps if you are debinding multiple magazines and want to keep each magazine held together until you get around to scanning them. Also its a good practice to not place the entire magazine in the ADF at once. Its best to place only 20-30 pages into the ADF at once, if you place in too many pages the rollers may pick up multiple pages at once. While you are scanning one half of the magazines, the binder clips can hold together the other half.

Technique

So now you have the magazine, box cutter, ruler and a sturdy surface. You also remembered to flip through the magazine and write down the page numbers of the magazine with no page number on either side. So now armed with all that information lets get started.

STOP!

Before you cut into that cover there is one more thing you should do! Before cutting apart the magazine you should scan the front cover of the magazine. Remember we are cutting away part of the magazine so that we can get a better scans of the inside pages. But in doing so we are cutting the covers short. Before debinding the magazine you are going to want lay the magazine on your scanner and scan those covers. These covers will get scanned again when you feed it through the ADF, But you are going to replace those scans with the flatbed scans.

This brings me to those pesky address labels! How do you remove them? Well if you have a hair dryer laying around you can use it to heat up the address label. I usually heat up the label for about 2 minutes from both sides of the cover. Then gently peel it back from the corner. If you feel any resistance you should immediately stop and try from another corner. I usually keep the hair dryer on the label and peel back as the hot air is blowing. Once the label is removed there may still be some glue residue left on the magazine cover. This glue can re adhere to other pages, I mention this because I usually remove address labels far in advance from the actual debinding of the magazine. If you remove the address label and stack other magazines on top of each other, The glue can get stuck and damage the cover.

Some of this next part will apply to right handed people. You will want to do the reverse if you are left handed.

Now we are ready to debind the magazine, Place the magazine on the right hand side of the tray table with the front cover facing up and the top of the magazine facing you. This will place the binding on your right hand side, which I find is the best way. Now grab your ruler and lay it at about a quarter of an inch from the edge of the magazine, make sure that the top and bottom of the ruler are equal lengths away from the edge of the magazine. You will then want to apply enough pressure on the ruler so that you dont move the ruler as you cut.

Ok left hand holding ruler down on magazine, and the right hand with the box cutter. You will want to make a full length cut down the magazine. You should only be applying enough pressure to the box cutter so that you are cutting through a maximum of 3 pages! When you have made your first cut you can remove the ruler from the magazine. Now that you have cut through the magazine you are going to take that cover and slowly remove it from the magazine. You may have just cut through the magazine cover but there may still be some glue holding onto that page. So grab the cover and flip it over next to the magazine with the cover facing down and right side up. This pile will become your debinded pile. You will continue to follow the original cut lines and cut through 2-3 pages at a time. After each cut you will move page by page to the debinded pile.

You may think that because you cut through 2-3 pages that you can take a shortcut and just pick up 2-3 pages and move them to the debinded pile. Don't do this for the following reasons...

• Even though you cut through multiple pages, the glue may have seeped over and pages may still be stuck together.
• There may be subscription cards between pages, even if the subscription card has been removed
• Individually moving pages lets you see any dog eared pages that may cause jams
• Individually moving pages lets you see any damaged pages that may cause jams
• Individually moving pages gets any dirt or such from between the pages