DIY Book Scanner

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

These kinds of discussions need more real examples to accurately depict the tradeoffs of destructive vs non-destructive scanning, so I'll add scans I personally made.

Here are two pages from Cracking the Coding Interview, 6th Edition, that I preferred over the digital versions I found online that were hard on the eyes because I disliked the black-and-white scans. Feel free to ask me about "details" in the process

https://imgur.com/2ZQFZ5p

It's entirely possible to accomplish post-processing without writing code if you have Adobe Photoshop.

I used a free-to-the-public bookscanner built by the Digital Archivists at Noisebridge in San Francisco to take pictures of all pages in my textbooks (it took a while). In Photoshop, you can record a macro to automatically crop to a rectangular region determined by just one or more points that are guaranteed to be on the page in every photo. The selection is made by the quick selection tool (selects similar pixels to the page color in the same region). With this macro recorded, you can run it in bulk through all files.

The textbook size was still large digitally (a gigabyte) because I wanted the highest quality possible for studying, but it beat having to carry heavy textbooks for sure. I also shared these files with friends and we were able to study without any physical textbooks for books that were not available digitally—it was amazing.

Personally I avoided all the deskewing technologies and preferred just pictures, all in color, as close to the real thing as possible, because Noisebridge's scanner used two DSLRs and the pictures were high quality. It was better than converting everything to black-and-white for reading enjoyability. OCR through ABBYY FineReader.

Overall it gets more annoying the thicker the textbook is. If destructive scanning is acceptable, one can just buy the book, go to FedEx and ask them cut the spine off for $4 to convert it to loose-leaf, then run it through a document scanner such as ScanSnap ix500, which is much faster at around 25 pages/min at its slowest

One really cool feature about Noisebridge's scanner (picture below) was that you could view the camera's viewfinder live in real-time, thereby speeding up iteration and catching errors much faster

https://imgur.com/4Pkdp1j

At Japan in the meantime, people in book scanning community (that exists) often just cut the book spine and scan the pages using normal scanner, throw it away once all the pages are scanned.

People (rightly) value room spaces than books there. It's called "Ji-sui" (scanning by oneself) and gear recommendation sites like [1] are abundant. Another reason of "Ji-sui" prevalence was the poor availability of ebooks, although that reason was less relevant today.

[1] http://monomania.sblo.jp/article/60578693.html

Paper Upgrade was an awesome project and the author changed my life. I met my future wife on the plane while flying to visit him and donate a book scanner.

Thanks for buying and building a kit. I appreciated everyone who did that so much.