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DIY Book Scanner

diybookscanner.org

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Re: DIY Book Scanner

#61

Post by daniel_reetz »

markvdb wrote: post #45
BeetleB wrote: post #14

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…

Hi Mark! We had electronic and USB triggering working with SDM and CHDK before you joined. But no image transfer or control of settings by USB. We deliberately pursued mechanical triggering for places where a computer and crazy firmware wasn't an option. I donated quite a few scanners to projects and people who simply couldn't use that stuff at the digitization site.

Johannes (spreads) was one of the most inspiring people I've ever worked with, so thankful for the energy and intellect he brought to the project- and the software he built. I donated a pair of DSLRs to him as a thank-you. Last I heard he was still working in a related space, but at a higher level.

Personally, I left the project to join Apple (they refused to let me continue any work on the open- source project while I was employed there), and gave Jonathon (tenrec) control. He redesigned the scanner again and sold kits as well as produced a Raspberry Pi based controller with nice software. Seems he has closed the store.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#62

Post by dredmorbius »

ahi wrote: post #34
bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from 1930 Good news: It's very likely that the copyright has expired. If you were to scan them, remember to upload them to archive.org for everyone else to see. Bad news: It's only the case if the copyright hasn't been renewed by the owner. Usually most owners don't renew them, but to determine whether or not this is the case, you need to go through huge catalogs of registered entries from the U.S. copyright office…

Incorrect. It is almost certainly still in copyright in the United States. Anything published after 1925 will be in copyright except for those published without notice 1926-1977 or were not renewed 1926-1963. The exceptions almost certainly don't apply to NatGeo. Scanning typically falls under fair use, so copyright only applies to distribution of the scans. edit: Maybe you edited or maybe I'm just dumb. Anyway, the…

Under US law, between 1925 and 1964, it was necessary to renew copyright every 28 years.[1] There are many works which have fallen out of copyright for nonrenewal, and there are projects which are now going through copyright renewal records to determine which of these are in fact now public domain in the US. Roughly 3/4 of potentially copyrighted works (published since 1924 and initially registered) have proved to be public domain.

Once copyright has lapsed, it cannot be reinstated.

https://www.crummy.com/2019/07/22/0

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-19...

________________________________

Notes:

1. Technically, the obligation existed until the 1976 act, at which time copyright status was automatic, but was retroactively waived for works never having lapsed, back to 1964, in the 1992 act. It's complicated. (NYPL link above.)

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#63

Post by daniel_reetz »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #60
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…

Later on I worked briefly for the Archive. The scanner I designed later became their "ttscribe". It was fascinating to see their process up close.

(I'm the founder of DIY Book Scanner, ran it from 2009 to 2015)

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#65

Post by TaylorAlexander »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #58
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #50

Hello if anyone is in the Bay Area and has a book scanner I’d love to scan my copy of this book which was only printed in India in 2001 and seems relatively rare: 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.

NoiseBridge maintained a DIY Book Scanner for a long time.

Oooh good tip thank you

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#66

Post by wpietri »

flakiness wrote: post #55

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, altho…

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.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#67

Post by BeetleB »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #57
BeetleB wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it was a project called Paper Upgrade. Here is an old archive link: 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 d…

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.

Wow. He spoke highly of you when I met him. My guess is you had not yet married, though - it was shortly after your visit - perhaps a month or two.

And yes, Paper Upgrade was awesome (especially if he did all the work on it). I was sad to hear he had shut it down.

Oh, and I'll make a note to myself never to work for Apple ;-)

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#68

Post by dahart »

> While there are some computer algorithms that can help dewarp the pages after capture, it is always more reliable to just capture flat pages in the first place.

I’m sure this is technically true, but curious how much it matters in practice today? Reading Google’s book scanning patents I found a description of a de-warper based on capturing a 3d depth scan of the book, which I assumed they were using in order to achieve the scale of scanning all books on earth. Capturing and de-warping a 3d depth scan would also be leagues more reliable than trying to do a purely 2d image based de-warp.

> The lights must also be positioned to minimize glare and reflections.

For my personal photo scanning and archiving project, I used a polarizing filter on the light and on the camera in order to eliminate specular glare, it works amazingly well. Would that be impractical, and/or not work as well on books for some reason?

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#69

Post by david_allison »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #42
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…

Were you using gloves or something like that?

Unsure about IA, but gloves are typically advised against[0] unless you have a suspicion that the book will be dangerous (arsenic ink in bindings[1], dust, mold or frass (sadly)[2]). Hand-washing before is typical advice but YMMV

[0] https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/why-wearing-gloves...

[1] https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/

[2] https://www.ifla.org/node/93094

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#70

Post by bobbytakeitwith »

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?

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