Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DIY Book Scanner

diybookscanner.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 132 posts

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#91

Post by donalhunt »

markvdb wrote: post #52
Topgamer7 wrote: post #4

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.

Automated page turning is an incredibly complex problem to tackle. It won't gain you as much as you'd think either. "Book" and "page" are a surprisingly difficult to define categories. If my experience helping to build the diybookscanner.org project taught me anything, it's that picking the low hanging fruit of small efficiency improvements to the (semi-)manual process is so much more effective...

Which is probably why some of the scanning locations used something very similar to this DIY effort (I'm familiar with the Oxford, UK location that existed in the mid 00s). Humans turned the pages with the finger tips mentioned in another comment.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#92

Post by Finnotesorg »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #59
fortran77 wrote: post #15

I built a similar one of these from a kit that Dan Reetz made. (Technology has improved since I built mine.) I have eliminated most printed books. I had to pass a "psychological barrier" before I was able to discard the books I scanned. The last holdout was music scores, but I now use an iPad for music at the piano.

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

I also want this.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#93

Post by jbaiter »

daniel_reetz wrote: post #61
markvdb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Hey Mark, hey Daniel, Johannes here, thanks for the praise, you're making me blush :D. The inspiration was mutual, I remember the time working on spreads and with you guys very fondly, learned a lot from it.

I'm still active in the "digitizing books" sector, albeit now officially employed at a library and more concerned with what we can do with the books after they're scanned :-)

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#95

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

jccalhoun wrote: post #28
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…

scantailor will get you most of the way there. the original project is dead but there are a few forks on github. It has been a while since I did any serious scanning so I can't remember which version I used. https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced https://github.com/trufanov-nok/scantailor-universal

I scan heavily from academic libraries in order to contribute to LibGen, but even with Scantailor it is very time-consuming. For example, if you are scanning scientific literature from the Eastern Bloc, it was often printed on low-quality, speckled paper, which means Scantailor often identifies too much of the scan as the page block, and then you have to manually tweak the rectangle.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#96

Post by hackeyed »

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…

Right, step 1 -> get page images, step 2 -> author images into book file. While OCR is obviously useful for search, a rotated phone screen will let you comfortably read a pdf book just fine unless you are talking about something like a textbook, in which case you probably wanted a tablet anyway.

I wrote up a guide on the authoring process using FOSS tools for some Digital Humanities folks a couple years ago: https://github.com/wikey/bookscan

It gives some background on the problem and covers a Scantailor (page crop, rotate, deskew), pdfbeads (compression, book metadata) authoring workflow, with pdftk for some general odds and ends.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#97

Post by xtiansimon »

wwn_se wrote: post #87
thrdbndndn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>” Ripping is usually more of a problem..”

Accidentally ripping a page while turning the pages too quickly.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#98

Post by mattowen_uk »

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.

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, but the accurate OCRing, and for things like magazines, the storage of all those high resolution pages. Right now, I cut out the articles I want to keep from my monthly mags, and just scan those. It seems like a fair compromise right now.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#99

Post by mattowen_uk »

braincode wrote: post #56

I'd love to see something like this made out of entirely recycled phones and their cameras instead of going with discrete components... any leads?

I've just built a basic basic overhead 'rostrum' type rig using some wood, screws, and an older Android phone.

The phone's camera points down at a height of about 20cm/8" and can see an area on the base plate big enough for the object I'm capturing (in this case, 3.5" floppy disks).

I use an app called IP Camera (it's on the Play store for free) to serve the image via http. I then remotely grab it, process/crop it and store it. The project is in it's early stages, but is working quite well so far.

Re: DIY Book Scanner

#100

Post by gpm »

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?

The advice I was given when handling some of the books at the university of toronto's rare book collection was to simply not directly touch the parts that matter if it can be avoided. Turn pages via their margins.
Post reply on HN