111–120 of 153 posts
Every time I see an archival process like this I'm amazed at all the effort and wonder if we'll ever get something like the process described in "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge where a library is archived by essentially shredding the books and blowing that shredded material through a tube stuffed with high speed high quality cameras and just gluing them all back together in software. It's a very fun book that cranks u…
Library/archive/historical-preservation people these days, for a while now, generally don't use "scanners" to digitize historical printed/2D material images, but ordinary high-quality digital cameras, set on tripods, often downward-facing, and manual page-turning.
There is various plans for DIY rigs for such on the internet, for instance here: https://www.diybookscanner.org/.
(although that site seems to be unmaintained with many broken links, it has enough working links you should be able to get the idea. This was a much more popular hobbyist DIY thing a decade+ ago, in the era of dawn of google books etc).
I wonder if there were particular reasons OP went with a "scanner". it seems a lot of the challenge was finding an affordable scanner that could handle the material. Perhaps it ends up being much (much) faster per-page, especially if you are willing to destroy the original, and is so justified? (Even though they ended up having to do manual page feed, possibly still much faster?) Or if they just didn't think of camera-tripod-manually-turned-pages and know it was a (common) option? If it hasn't been considered, it might be worth considering, although the process they have seems to be working well -- the sample output is stunning!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hydraulic drive paper cutters are great for high-volume print finishing (I used several in print production for about two years), but I’d be wary of them for this use case: - Waste is high. To trim off a spine, you likely have to take more of the margin than you’d like (if you trim too close to the edge of a glued spine, the risk is higher that you may bludgeon the stack of pages under pressure instead of cutting it)…
What if instead of cutting, we sanded them? The pressure on the surfaces would be smaller and it could remove just enough to debind the volume.
I don’t know what the actual paper weight is but it looks in the “bible paper and cheap newsprint” range (~40-60gsm), which will probably rip as soon as a belt/orbital sander crosses the glue line into the looser leaves (and you have to cross the glue line to debind, and by nature that line isn’t normally straight, because glue does not melt evenly). You also destroy the spine, making it harder to identify issues at a glance.
A thermal binding machine would likely melt the glue in 45-90 seconds without those risks. And you might even be able to rebind after the scan with fresh glue strips using the same machine, assuming you don’t have to cut the cover wrap.
the author is also self aware (cf the Byte episode) which is unusual.
I am fascinated that the computer shopper never made the transition to the web. They could have been the ur-vertical site. This shows how pernicious path dependence is.
Every time I see an archival process like this I'm amazed at all the effort and wonder if we'll ever get something like the process described in "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge where a library is archived by essentially shredding the books and blowing that shredded material through a tube stuffed with high speed high quality cameras and just gluing them all back together in software. It's a very fun book that cranks u…
That's essentially how DNA sequencing works. The longest human chromosome (chr1) has about 250M bases. The DNA samples are sonicated to split them into small sequences, and then sequenced en mass 100-300bps at a time. The results are then reassembled into contigs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#High-throughput...
This... is fugging amazing. No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to remember the heyday of Computer Shopper won't get it (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says, practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard, some RAM, maybe a Sound…
Back in the 90s, my brother actually had a subscription to Computer Shopper (he had a side hustle building PCs for entertainment industry folks). I only ever bought it if I was planning on building something which was rare because computers were expensive back then. The last PC I built literally did not have two components from the same vendor. To be honest, I don’t miss those days. Say what you like about the “Apple…
Where's the fun in that? Building your own PC is a thrill - budgeting, chosing components, excitedly waiting for each to arrive or picking them from shelf, assembling everything and then pressing the power button to power everything up for the first time. Followed by your heart sinking when nothing happens "ohfuckohfuckohfuck, did I I just burn something out - there isn't any smoke, but I hope it's not the processor". Reseat everything, reconnect cables, get an some sign of life, but it's an error code - progress. Multiple attempts at fixing the error and finally get a POST screen. Apple can't sell that emotional experience or sense of ownership - self-built machines have a personality.
The extra RAM and/or cores I get from a self-build vs. equally priced Apple computer is just a bonus. Modern standards make surprise incompatibilities less likely than in the past, looking at the specs works 99.9% of the times
Having said that, today when I encounter the phrase "high capacity magazines" in the news, I chuckle because firearms isn't what first comes to mind.
This... is fugging amazing. No, seriously. It really is. Those of you who are too young to remember the heyday of Computer Shopper won't get it (probably) but that magazine was ... well, as the article says, practically a "bible" to some of us. There was NOTHING like finding the new issue on the news-stand, buying it, and rushing home to pore over the ads, looking for a sweet new motherboard, some RAM, maybe a Sound…
I've said it before, The IA is a crown jewel of the internet. But now I'll add "and God Bless Jason Scott". This might be one of the most important historical pricing repositories that track tech trends ever produced when it's done. Imagine tracking the weekly per-MB prices of hard drives or even more volatile DRAM from 1979 to 2009. And then there's tracking the emergence and transition between technologies, correla…