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DIY Book Scanner

diybookscanner.org

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Re: DIY Book Scanner

#81

Post by subpar »

raybb wrote: post #39
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…

Wow that's awesome! I take it you're responsible for a chunk of the books available now on openlibrary.org? When scanning books like that did you ever see anything interesting or are you so zoned out you don't really pay attention?

A very small chunk, I only lasted a couple months. Most of it was pretty boring, think volume after volume of copyright records or issues of the national stamp collector's magazine. Eventually I started working on some of the contract work they did for other agencies, e.g. declassified FBI case reports. The best was the stuff for the Smithsonian, which often included beautiful naturalist illustrations. I'm not sure how much of that stuff was public domain though.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#82

Post by subpar »

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?

Nope. I'm not sure if this is the right way to put it, but we were basically a scanning factory. I think the really sensitive documents got routed elsewhere. Books and folios that had large format foldouts got more specialized, ahem, white glove treatment. Many scanners wore these little textured rubber finger tips: https://rubber_finger_tips.jpg.so/

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#83

Post by timonoko »

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

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#84

Post by timonoko »

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

Nobody asked, but for the record, this is how make real one-page PDF from two-page scans. (gm = GraphicsMagick)

    mkdir kaksi
    rm kaksi/*
    j=102 
    scale=600
    size=500x730
    yla=27
    for x in *.pnm ; do
     echo $x
    gm convert $x -rotate 90 -crop $size+20+$yla -resize $scale -normalize kaksi/k$j.jpg
      j=$((j+2))
    done    
    j=103
    for x in *.pnm ; do
     echo $x
    gm convert $x -rotate 90 -crop $size+530+$yla -resize $scale -normalize kaksi/k$j.jpg
      j=$((j+2))
    done
    cd kaksi
    gm convert *.jpg -format pdf TheBook.pdf

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#86

Post by SolonIslandus »

wpietri wrote: post #66
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.

Something like this?

https://1dollarscan.com/sp/

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#87

Post by wwn_se »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #76
david_allison wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I get the points against gloves in your links, but from my experience my hands will constantly leave fingerprints and oil on the books no matter how much I wash it. How do they avoid this issue? Or just don't bother?

Ripping is usually more of a problem than some finger oil and gloves makes you less sensitive and more likely to rip or destroy stuff.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#89

Post by shard »

markvdb wrote: post #47
shard wrote: post #21

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.

Display should be visible indeed. 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 wo…

> Destructive scanning feels incredibly cruel to the books.

I suppose it depends on whether it has sentimental value. When I was young, I'd treat my books like treasures, putting covers on them (even paperbacks), making sure I didn't crease the spine when I read them. Now I consider books to be a temporary store of knowledge as the contents pass to my brain. I fold pages, underline, scribble notes in them. There are thousands more copies out there, I don't feel any need to baby my copy.

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