41–50 of 132 posts
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…
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 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.
Picture a wedge (shaped like the V of a book lying open on a table) that could move up and down. The wedge would descend and insert itself into the V of the book's pages, then rising up would suck the 2 left and right sheets against the sides of the wedge, scanning as it went.
Then it would blow those 2 pages to the left (or right I forget) and descend again and do the next set.
I thought it was pretty cool. Have never seen something like it since.
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…
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…
I saw the diybookscanner community - which at that point mostly had Daniel Reetz [1] as its active contributor- struggle with mechanical contraptions for triggering cameras and very little software experience. I built a simple proof of concept to reliably trigger cheap consumer cameras using software. I built it on CHDK[2], the Canon Hack Development Kit, alternative firmware for cheap consumer cameras. The proof of concept worked.
I then had a fairly large number of book scanner kits built and shipped mostly around the EU [3]. More of a work of love than a business really, even if it was formally under an llc umbrella. Johannes initially was just a customer. He wanted to build a better software solution, and within the spirit of the project did so as free software. I tried to support him at this as well as I could, setting up build infrastructure, trying to reel in more people, getting him some cameras to test, get the amazing CHDK people to port to new camera models, ...
Then real life intervened indeed.
Johannes, if you read this, I'm still grateful for the experience of having worked with a great developer like you!
[EDIT] And of course, I should also mention Dan Reetz' incredibly inspiring work bootstrapping an incredible open hardware project! Hats off!
[0] https://github.com/DIYBookScanner/spreads
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…
This really needs to be redesigned for ergonomics. - Lever should have a button for capture - Display should be visible while looking down But now I see why destructive scanning (slicing the binding off and using a sheet feeding scanner) is so attractive. For any non-rare books, this is just too tedious and time consuming to go through for more than a few books.
Your capture triggering suggestion is not as great though. The systems that I shipped with http://diybookscanner.eu actually used a USB foot pedal for triggering the cameras. That's by far a superior user experience to pressing a button while both hands are busy moving a cradle...
Destructive scanning feels incredibly cruel to the books. A non-destructive system like this actually works fairly well. You can expect to get up to about 1000-1200 pages an hour with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Spreads[0] is probably what you are referring to. Some backstory: I saw the diybookscanner community - which at that point mostly had Daniel Reetz [1] as its active contributor- struggle with mechanical contraptions for triggering cameras and very little software experience. I built a simple proof of concept to reliably trigger cheap consumer cameras using software. I built it on CHDK[2], the Canon Hack Development K…
http://web.archive.org/web/20140101000000*/http://www.paperu...
I don't know if you can find the code through there, but I'm pretty sure he had made it free. I think spreads is a bit newer.
Edit: Found some more info. It did indeed use Scantailor in the backend. His SW was more of a Web based frontend to all the parts. You can see a video demo of it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad7aFYdbDos
Start at about 4:40.
The source is here:
This really needs to be redesigned for ergonomics. - Lever should have a button for capture - Display should be visible while looking down But now I see why destructive scanning (slicing the binding off and using a sheet feeding scanner) is so attractive. For any non-rare books, this is just too tedious and time consuming to go through for more than a few books.
If your goal is to scan a whole bunch, it's tedious. If you want to do it once in a while, it's not really a problem.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780140298246/Patents-Myths-Reality...
I did fill out the form for the internet archive but it talked about scanning a library and I’m not sure they want to deal with just one book.