A question about printers

[JustInStarting]

This might be a silly question, but here it goes-

I want to copy (and sometimes scan) several dozen diaries/recipe books etc.  for an ancestry project.
Because I don’t want to tear off pages I have to copy one page at a time. Place the page on the printer bed, press print, take the printed page, feed it back for double side printing etc. It’s very time consuming.

My printer is really old, so I’m thinking of buying a new one.  I wonder if there’s a printer/copier/scanner   that can do the following.  I place the each page manually on the printer bed, the printer retains all information of each page, then once it retains the information of the entire diary, I hit the copy or scan button and the printer copies /scans everything at once.

Does a printer like that exist? Or am I dreaming?

[dcheesi]

Commercial office copiers can do something like that. No idea about home copiers.

Or you could scan everything into a computer, combine them all into one file, and then print that?

[robartsd]

Many office copiers scan and hold jobs. For home use, I'd look to software that makes it easy to make a multi-page pdf of the scans then print from the PDF as dcheesi suggests. If you're using a Windows desktop, you might try NAPS2.

[Cadman]

It's been my experience that those 3-in-1 units make enough concessions to be poor at all 3 jobs. If you have a lot of scanning to do, I'd pick up a dedicated flatbed scanner. Check the usual sources (CL, FB Marketplace, etc) for a deal on a good used one. You can set up a workflow to resize, adjust and combine your scans into a PDF after the fact and the docs can live on in perpetuity in digital form.

[Prairie Stash]

My phone? I would take a picture of each page, then print all the pages to PDF. If you really want a paper copy, you can print it off just like any other document from your computer.

If I was doing a lot of this I would nake a stand for my phone, google gound this:

https://www.instructables.com/id/Phone-Scanner-Stand/

There are also apps for phone scanners; if its just text.

[chemistk]

It really sounds like your best bet is indeed to scan everything, edit, and collate it how you want and then go back and print out the finished product.

[JustInStarting]

Thank you all.

Yes, I agree that scanning and then printing is the best thing to do. Then I don't have to spend money for a new printer for another couple of years. :)

[jim555]

Google has a whole project for digitizing books without spine removal.  They programmatically flatten a picture of a book page to correct the wavy image.  The machine does one page at a time and mechanically turns the pages.