Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DIY Book Scanner

diybookscanner.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 132 posts

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#101

Post by subset »

subpar wrote: post #30

My first job out of college was scanning books for the Internet Archive down in the basement of the Library of Congress. Their scanning machines used a foot pedal to raise and lower the glass Platen, so I'd use one hand to flip the page and wiggle the cradle to get things nice and flat and the other would snap the photo. You can get pretty fast after a while, but boy is it mindless. Older books that had been rebound…

I currently work for the University I study at in the (biomedical) library. I scan lots of old journal articles and periodicals for academics who need it for their research. A typical job might be scanning an article from 1960 on Potato Research for an agriculturalist, or a graph of human energy expenditure, or an analysis of fibres for forensic medicine. We get researchers from all around the world requesting articles on all sorts of topics from our archives. It's a Sandstone university, so we have some very old collections that are definitely getting crumby!

Other than locating the books, by far the most tedious aspect is the scanning. We only have a terrible flatbed scanner, that is completely unforgiving - it only has a 25 page email limit, otherwise you have to split it into separate emails. And if you mis-scan a page accidentally (some of the book margins are super tight), then you have to restart the entire scan - there's no delete page button!

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#102

Post by 0wis »

subpar wrote: post #30

My first job out of college was scanning books for the Internet Archive down in the basement of the Library of Congress. Their scanning machines used a foot pedal to raise and lower the glass Platen, so I'd use one hand to flip the page and wiggle the cradle to get things nice and flat and the other would snap the photo. You can get pretty fast after a while, but boy is it mindless. Older books that had been rebound…

Oh I understand you ! I would have love to have design hints like that for one summer job I had. I was tasked to scan medical books with thousands of pages. I had little time constraints and could do it wherever I wanted. I was paid 80$ per book which I found crazy huge before starting. Even by optimizing every parameter of the hardware, software and my workspace, I couldn’t do more than a few 2-hour sessions per day and it took me several days per book. A boring job if there is one. I would certainly use it as a zen practice today but as a teenager, not really needing the money, I couldn’t find any value in it (after optimization).

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#103

Post by mymythisisthis »

subpar wrote: post #30

My first job out of college was scanning books for the Internet Archive down in the basement of the Library of Congress. Their scanning machines used a foot pedal to raise and lower the glass Platen, so I'd use one hand to flip the page and wiggle the cradle to get things nice and flat and the other would snap the photo. You can get pretty fast after a while, but boy is it mindless. Older books that had been rebound…

Nice old batteries https://ia800608.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#104

Post by pflanze »

timonoko wrote: post #83

If you have fast flatbed scanner, you can scan 300 pages in thirty minutes. Not worth the effort to build automation. Bigger problem was to sort out all errors and missed pages afterwards. Real-time display (from Imagemaqick) solved this problem: while true ; do for x in *.pnm ; do killall display display -rotate 90 $x & done sleep 5 done

If I read this right then it means "every 5 second, open the last scanned page (and nothing else / close the previous one)". But this seems like an inefficient way to do it, opening and killing all irrelevant pages all the time. This will be more efficient and react more quickly:

    lastfile=
    while true; do
        newestfile=$(ls *.pnm | tail -1)
        if [ "$newestfile" != "$lastfile" ]; then
            kill %
            display -rotate 90 "$newestfile" &
            lastfile=$newestfile
        fi
        sleep 0.3
    done

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#105

Post by mcguire »

Are the kits back in stock?

I fooled around with the DIY option, but realized I was incompetent. Ended up buying a cheap Czur scanner, which works surprisingly well.

For it, you hold the book open on the black mat on a table. The scanner uses a laser to measure and correct page curvature, and takes a picture of both pages.

It produces decent PDFs (I'm not sure about the comparative resolution) with (bad) OCR'ed text. (The IA re-OCR's the book after upload, right?)

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#106

Post by timonoko »

pflanze wrote: post #104
timonoko wrote: post #83

If you have fast flatbed scanner, you can scan 300 pages in thirty minutes. Not worth the effort to build automation. Bigger problem was to sort out all errors and missed pages afterwards. Real-time display (from Imagemaqick) solved this problem: while true ; do for x in *.pnm ; do killall display display -rotate 90 $x & done sleep 5 done

If I read this right then it means "every 5 second, open the last scanned page (and nothing else / close the previous one)". But this seems like an inefficient way to do it, opening and killing all irrelevant pages all the time. This will be more efficient and react more quickly: lastfile= while true; do newestfile=$(ls *.pnm | tail -1) if [ "$newestfile" != "$lastfile" ]; then kill % display -rotate 90 "$newestfile"…

"Saving precious bits like it is 1969".

This would make an excellent song title.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#107

Post by hackeyed »

nanna wrote: post #94

Anyone have thoughts on the Easy Book Scanner design by David Landin? https://www.instructables.com/Book-Scanner-Low-cost-easy-to-...

Looks incredibly serviceable and well engineered. I would expect reasonable and consistent results from the rig. The biggest question would come down to the cameras.

With these kind of rigs (two cameras, not computer controlled, no computer display) your big potential sources of error are either accidentally failing to trigger one camera or cameras losing focus on the page (especially if you are at something like the end of a chapter where there is often empty space in the middle of the page where the camera's auto-focus area is). His solution of using the IR remote should significantly reduce the issue of failing to capture on one camera. Cameras exist with manual focus settings, but they are often pricier or too old to reliably find one worth recommending to others. The CHDK alternative firmware for certain cheap Canon cameras generally adds a manual focus option for the less expensive cameras (though the individual features depend on who is making the firmware build you get).

Another option worth investigating is the newest Raspberry Pi camera modules with external lenses. Those should give you manual focus and the ability to build up an automated workflow you like around things like moving files around and any pre-processing you need. An ~9 mega pixel camera gets you 300dpi resolution on a full sheet of A4 paper, which is a lot more than most books.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#108

Post by [deleted] »

pflanze wrote: post #104
timonoko wrote: post #83

If you have fast flatbed scanner, you can scan 300 pages in thirty minutes. Not worth the effort to build automation. Bigger problem was to sort out all errors and missed pages afterwards. Real-time display (from Imagemaqick) solved this problem: while true ; do for x in *.pnm ; do killall display display -rotate 90 $x & done sleep 5 done

If I read this right then it means "every 5 second, open the last scanned page (and nothing else / close the previous one)". But this seems like an inefficient way to do it, opening and killing all irrelevant pages all the time. This will be more efficient and react more quickly: lastfile= while true; do newestfile=$(ls *.pnm | tail -1) if [ "$newestfile" != "$lastfile" ]; then kill % display -rotate 90 "$newestfile"…

[deleted]

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#109

Post by pfp »

bobbytakeitwith wrote: post #70
subpar wrote: post #30

My first job out of college was scanning books for the Internet Archive down in the basement of the Library of Congress. Their scanning machines used a foot pedal to raise and lower the glass Platen, so I'd use one hand to flip the page and wiggle the cradle to get things nice and flat and the other would snap the photo. You can get pretty fast after a while, but boy is it mindless. Older books that had been rebound…

Back when this was a more popular problem, I saw a number of projects that used a rubber tipped stick to automate page turning. I wonder why this never took off?

I'd really like to see this too.

Building a scanner would be interesting, but the mind-numbing idea of turning pages manually isn't very enticing

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#110

Post by pflanze »

timonoko wrote: post #106
pflanze wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I read this right then it means "every 5 second, open the last scanned page (and nothing else / close the previous one)". But this seems like an inefficient way to do it, opening and killing all irrelevant pages all the time. This will be more efficient and react more quickly: lastfile= while true; do newestfile=$(ls *.pnm | tail -1) if [ "$newestfile" != "$lastfile" ]; then kill % display -rotate 90 "$newestfile"…

"Saving precious bits like it is 1969". This would make an excellent song title.

Sorry but I find your answer disappointing and crossing over into offending. I spent some time first trying to understand how your code makes sense, then to write up a better solution and posted it, and you don't seem to be thankful at all and are instead dissing my effort. Sure, if it works for you, fine, I was under the impression that you didn't know better. You could have saved me time by indicating that you know your solution is hacky but you don't care.
Post reply on HN