DIY Book Scanner
diybookscanner.org
DIY Book Scanner
1–10 of 132 posts
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#2Here it is in action:
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#3Last year I bought a czur book scanner that looks kind of like a lamp to try and archive some 100 year old books I had limited access to. The resolution of the camera was so low I ended up balancing my phone on top and getting better images just using it as a light.
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#4I remember reading about Google's book scanner that operated automatically using vacuum pressure to gently flip pages. I'd love to see an open source variety of that.
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#5I've used scan tailor in the past to convert a outboard motor manual to pdf, it's pretty powerful. I didn't have a proper setup, but my results still came out decently.
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#6I'm very interested in getting into archival (getting started this month after a few more conversations).
Your buy button[0] is broken. You're potentially missing out on a few sales due to this.
Is 2x 4GB SD card sufficient for your purposes? I've been quoted 50MB TIFF images as a standard, and a lot of books wouldn't fit without swapping SDs at that size.
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#7I need this for some vintage IBM/PC-compatible programming books that are a zillion pages long.
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#8Nice to provide hardware hints and designs but geez that is almost the least of it. Cleverest hardware still only gets you a thumb drive full of page images. Now what? There needs to be a software workflow ending with a readable book in PDF, EBOOK or MOBI format, and there are many, many choices to be made along that path.
Edit: "Finishing a book" is discussed at a very superficial level here: https://vimeo.com/user33752051 at about 1:00:
"In order to turn these raw images into an ebook, the very minimum you need to do is A, you need to rotate them, B you need to crop them down to use the page [?], and C you need to combine them into one document like a PDF... You can do OCR to make it searchable ... color correction... de-skewing, de-warping ..."
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#9I remember reading about Google's book scanner that operated automatically using vacuum pressure to gently flip pages. I'd love to see an open source variety of that.
I think about Google's scanner project a lot. I wonder if they are still scanning?
I would love if they found a way to offer those books (authors would have to agree) to the world.
If they did, I would forgive them for tracking me all these years.
I'd even put up with ads in the books.
Re: DIY Book Scanner
#10Nice to provide hardware hints and designs but geez that is almost the least of it. Cleverest hardware still only gets you a thumb drive full of page images. Now what? There needs to be a software workflow ending with a readable book in PDF, EBOOK or MOBI format, and there are many, many choices to be made along that path. Edit: "Finishing a book" is discussed at a very superficial level here: https://vimeo.com/user3…
The simplest of which would be to turn the images into a multi page raster PDF, using freely licensed linux based command line tools for PDF generation. Which will of course result in a rather large file size vs doing OCR, but might be the best preservation method for books with illustrations, unusual fonts, catalogs, mixed text and photos, etc.
I am not clear on to what extent the existing workflow does a de-skew of the camera images to deal with page curvature towards the spine.
I think I recall the Internet Archive having an open source design for something similar to this? And other projects which accomplish generally the same idea.