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Old 03-03-2008, 05:57 AM   #1
guylhem
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Digitizing physical ebooks : hardware recommandation ?

Hello

I have a large physical ebook collection, and a problem : I want to carry along with me when I move, which I frequently do.

In fact, I have been thinking about that for a long time, but since I will soon be relocating across the Atlantic ocean, I want to act now.

What hardware could you recommand ?

My books are nowhere to be found online - legally or not. I do not want to waste anymore time looking for each individual ebook, and therefore I am totally ready to destroy my books in the process (cut the bindings).

So I am looking for an efficient page-fed scanner for normal ebooks, ie smaller than A4/legal, for a decent price.

Decent is defined by efficiency :-) Something that could do all my books in a week would be worth $2000 or more. Something else is worth much less.

Ideally, it would create PDFs with a pictures of each page, and a transparent overlay of the OCR'ed text for easy indexation.

If it would work with Linux or MacOSX, it would be even better, but I could certainly borrow a Windows laptop for a while.

Guylhem
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Old 03-03-2008, 12:25 PM   #2
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Since you're willing to unbind them, pretty much any scanner that has a sheet feeder would do you. You may be able to find one that will scan both sides, but if not, you'd have to re-integrate the two sides, which is apt to be tedious.

Abby Fine Reader (sp?) has been recommended for OCR use, it's pricey, but it's got a lot of features that make it easier to use.

There are a number of threads around the forum that discuss specific scanners and techniques that would probably be helpful to you, as well.

Hope that gets you started, at least.
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Old 03-03-2008, 12:29 PM   #3
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Actually, I am looking for a specific hardware recommandation. Most sheet feeders have a limit on the amount of pages that can be fed - making them unpractical.

Some are also slower, so I was looking for personnal feedback.

What kind of scanner are you using ? Are you limited in the amount of page that can be fed? How long does it take to proceed a standard 200 pages book ?

Guylhem
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Old 03-03-2008, 12:40 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by guylhem View Post
Actually, I am looking for a specific hardware recommandation. Most sheet feeders have a limit on the amount of pages that can be fed - making them unpractical.

Some are also slower, so I was looking for personnal feedback.

What kind of scanner are you using ? Are you limited in the amount of page that can be fed? How long does it take to proceed a standard 200 pages book ?

Guylhem
Why not just buy an OpticBook scanner from Plustek? It's designed so that the book hangs off the side of the scanner with the page to be scanned on the scanning plate. They run about $250-$350 on eBay. That way you don't have to go through all the effort to cut each book apart.

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Old 03-03-2008, 12:42 PM   #5
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What kind of scanner are you using ? Are you limited in the amount of page that can be fed? How long does it take to proceed a standard 200 pages book?
Unfortunately, my personal experiences on this won't be much use to you. The specific answers to your questions are: I'm not; N/A; N/A; N/A.

That's why I tried to give you what little relevant info I happened to know, partly in hopes that it might be some help to you, but mostly to bump the thread back to the top in hopes that someone who has some actual experience with it would see it and chime in.

On the number of sheets it takes at a time, once you know how long it takes to run through that many sheets, you can come back and re-fill it ... assuming that your other activities allow for that, of course. You might be able to pay a high-school (or even middle-school) student to baby-sit the thing for you -- again, if your circumstances allow. They do work cheap, you know.


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Originally Posted by delphidb96 View Post
Why not just buy an OpticBook scanner from Plustek? It's designed so that the book hangs off the side of the scanner with the page to be scanned on the scanning plate. They run about $250-$350 on eBay. That way you don't have to go through all the effort to cut each book apart.
Those are supposed to be good, but they would require doing the scanning by hand.

I'm told that Kinkos will de-bind books for you for a nominal fee. They'll even re-bind them later, for a similar fee. So de-binding them may not be all that big a deal.
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Old 03-03-2008, 03:42 PM   #6
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I suggest also looking at hiring one. I worked in a place that had a 60ppm duplex scanner that could (and did) run almost continuously. It cost about $50k, and looking round the net it seems that those things have dropped in price but not enough. So even paying $500 to hire the scanner plus PC it connects to for a few days might work out cheaper than buying a slower one. 36,000 pages per day assuming you stick at it for 10 hours... then you just have to OCR them (I'm not sure if that was built in, we didn't have any use for the feature if it was)

My approach is to buy an A3 scanner because I want to scan magazines, and I'll probably try to build a home-made book scanner like this guy did: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/periphera...ner-156334.php
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Old 03-05-2008, 08:31 AM   #7
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I use an HP scanjet N6010 at work. It is a sheet-feeder-only scanner and scans both sides in a single pass. If you run 300dpi b/w it is very fast, with higher resolution or with greyscale and color it drops down in speed considerably.
The problem is the feeder mechanism. I have yet to find any cut sheed feeder that does not jam or pull multiple pages. That's why printing presses lift each sheet with vacuum from the stack and then feed it into the machine rather than relying on some roller friction
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