[The guide isn't mine and I'm not affiliated with it, I'm just sharing a mind-blown moment for me.]

Over the years, I have gathered many notebooks that admittedly not all contain very important information and take up a lot of space (possibly a cubic meter or more). But being kind of a (data)hoarder, I dont want to just throw them away. It's work that took years.

My solution: scanning them. My phone has a built-in camera scanner that does a suprisingly good job (it helps that the camera is kinda good too), so I have scanned thousands of pages so far. But the process is slow and takes a lot of manual labor (flipping pages, aligning pages, retaking bad photos, creating pds etc.). A typical notebook (~120pages) may take me 15minutes or more.

So I thought that maybe I could speed up the process (partially at least) by either buying a scanner or paying someone to scan them (I don't have a proper scanner, yet). Removing the pages without damaging them is a challenge though. That's where the guide in the link comes in: it turns out it's very easy to remove the spiral spring from the notebooks! I was gonna pull the pages until I found that guide. I suppose it's also very easy to remove the staples from staple-bound notebooks too. I might just have "won" many hours of my life with this idea.

The video in the guide that helped me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfMUVpwLZGM

(For the record, my xiaomi 10 phone can scan items by creating ~20MP images which translates to typical-to-high resolutions if I scan A4 or A5 pages. Fortunately, many scanners can reach that quality. I just need them not to apply any weird effects or compression to the scanned document.)