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DIY Book Scanner

diybookscanner.org

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Re: DIY Book Scanner

#11

Post by zwayhowder »

I built one of these out of pine 2x4s and plywood. I thought it would be cheaper than buying one (I was wrong) but I'm also not a skilled woodworker and had to buy most of the tools.

It works quite well and I digitised dozens of textbooks I'd purchased and needed to reference but couldn't carry around every day while finishing my masters. My one had 2 Nikon mirrorless cameras controlled via Pi-Scan. https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan

I had a smaller toggle switch wired to the GPIO pins so I could click the scan next button without having to take my hands of the book. Once I got used to the workflow I could scan about 1000 pages per hour while watching Netflix.

I replaced it with a Czur scanner that isn't as good, but is a lot smaller and is good enough for my less demanding needs now that I'm not doing a masters degree :D

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#12

Post by zwayhowder »

david_allison wrote: post #6

I'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. [0] http://store.diybookscanner.org/

If you use pi-scan the images are saved to a USB drive instead of the SDcards.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#13

Post by david_allison »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #9
Topgamer7 wrote: post #4

I 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.

They do if the books are out of copyright, and they're often copied to archive.org (and then transcribed via Wikisource) when this happens.

sample: https://books.google.im/books?id=Me8CAAAAQAAJ&printsec=front...

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#14

Post by BeetleB »

fernly wrote: post #8

Nice 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…

Back in 2012, there was a guy who started an open source project that did exactly this - he wrote it specifically for the DIY Book scanner. It had a local Django project as the interface. I don't remember the details, but it did a decent job of taking the images, OCR'ing them and creating an output PDF.

I believe he abandoned the project some years later as life got busy and he never found enough volunteers to help him.

Would have to go through my email records to find the name of the project.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#15

Post by fortran77 »

I built a similar one of these from a kit that Dan Reetz made. (Technology has improved since I built mine.)

I have eliminated most printed books. I had to pass a "psychological barrier" before I was able to discard the books I scanned.

The last holdout was music scores, but I now use an iPad for music at the piano.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#17

Post by rahimnathwani »

fernly wrote: post #8

Nice 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…

https://www.instructables.com/Bargain-Price-Book-Scanner-Fro...

"Step 10 - Post-processing" has some steps

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#18

Post by fernly »

BeetleB wrote: post #14
fernly wrote: post #8

Nice 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…

Back in 2012, there was a guy who started an open source project that did exactly this - he wrote it specifically for the DIY Book scanner. It had a local Django project as the interface. I don't remember the details, but it did a decent job of taking the images, OCR'ing them and creating an output PDF. I believe he abandoned the project some years later as life got busy and he never found enough volunteers to help h…

Not the same as Scan Tailor[1,2] ? Which was referenced from the Instructables link cited earlier. That apparently was a comprehensive toolkit in C++ and Qt, now archived.

[1] https://scantailor.org/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210304015939/https://github.co...

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#19

Post by fernly »

david_allison wrote: post #6

I'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. [0] http://store.diybookscanner.org/

archiving what? just curious.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#20

Post by ghaff »

totetsu wrote: post #3

Last 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.

I find the latest Czur works well enough for non-glossy stuff. The broader scanning problem I find is that, beyond the small must scan category, I find I have so much stuff that generally it's not very practical.
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