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DIY Book Scanner

diybookscanner.org

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Re: DIY Book Scanner

#111

Post by timonoko »

pflanze wrote: post #110
timonoko wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Yes it is inefficient and weird. And thank you for saving the world. Not only Terran energy crisis, but we are also running out of useful data bits as universal entropy goes to infinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#112

Post by [deleted] »

timonoko wrote: post #111
pflanze wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes it is inefficient and weird. And thank you for saving the world. Not only Terran energy crisis, but we are also running out of useful data bits as universal entropy goes to infinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

[deleted]

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#113

Post by pflanze »

timonoko wrote: post #111
pflanze wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes it is inefficient and weird. And thank you for saving the world. Not only Terran energy crisis, but we are also running out of useful data bits as universal entropy goes to infinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

Please check the HN guidelines. "Be kind. Don't be snarky."

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#114

Post by ajot »

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…

This is an old article, so maybe some software isn't the best option nowadays, but you can get the idea of postprocessing: http://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning.h...

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#115

Post by daniel_reetz »

_virtu wrote: post #72

When I was in college the iPad had just come out. I was determined to save money so I snagged an iPad to use as my omnitextbook and built a scanner based upon one of the schematics on this site with a friend. I would usually be the guy that made an email group for everyone to share notes and questions for classes pre all of the blackboard garbage, so I started leveraging those connections and would ask if anyone woul…

Thanks for sharing your story, I'm so glad to hear it was useful to you and your crew. Were you ever active on the forums?

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#116

Post by daniel_reetz »

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-...

A lot of people on the DIY Book Scanner forums got a lot of value out of this design and David's presence on the forum. In my opinion it's an excellent starting point.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#117

Post by wintermutestwin »

SolonIslandus wrote: post #86
wpietri wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One business I kinda want to exist is a book warehouse/scanning operation. I send them boxes of books; they give me an app with access to digital versions of every book I send them. The whole operation is somewhere in, say, Nebraska, so storage cost is very low.

Something like this? https://1dollarscan.com/sp/

$.01 per page and they are based in Fremont, CA.

This looks like a cheaper way to get most ebooks and you can ship the books direct from Amazon. If enough people did this, maybe ebook pricing will come down to something rational.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#118

Post by pbhjpbhj »

0wis wrote: post #102
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…

Books that aren't rare, ie aren't valuable as artefacts, you would surely cut off the spine and run through an automated scanner?

But then medical texts probably cost way more than $80. How much was your boss making from those scans? Were they taking account of copyright law?

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#119

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #98
wpietri wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One business I kinda want to exist is a book warehouse/scanning operation. I send them boxes of books; they give me an app with access to digital versions of every book I send them. The whole operation is somewhere in, say, Nebraska, so storage cost is very low.

For a while there existed services that did this with your CD collection. You'd send them a crate of your music CDs and they'd send back all the music ripped as mp3s. Obviously, they didn't re-rip music they'd already ripped so technically for popular music, you got 'someone else's' mp3s. --- My multi function laser printer has a duplex scanner on it. It can scan pages at quite a rate. The problem is not the scanning…

Also, in UK with our strict "fair-dealing" (as opposed to USA's Fair Use) none of this is lawful - including ripping CDs for personal use (though that format-shifting was briefly allowed for a couple of years).

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion; not legal advice.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#120

Post by pbhjpbhj »

zwayhowder wrote: post #54
SamBam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the purpose? Did the digitized books go to the public domain/your university, or something, or was it purely for personal research?

Just for personal use as all the books were still in copyright and I own the paper versions, it was a (probably legal) fair use of them purely for reference while studying. I often needed to find information in the books and couldn't reasonably carry them all with me every day between work and uni.

In my opinion, buying a book (or other media) should give one right to a digital copy from any source.
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