DIY book scanner, 150 pages/min

[afv011]

We discovered the DIY Book Scanner Kit and the booming community of people building their own book scanners. At $475 instead of several thousand dollars, it felt like striking gold... if we could make it work.

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[Turtle91]

That kit is pretty cool. It is the result of a lot of input from people at http://www.diybookscanner.org

There are many different ways to make a scanner. Mine brings the platten diwn onto the book instead of the book up to the platten. It was quite fun learning the skills to make it (carpentry, electrical, optical, lighting, etc. ) - however this kit makes it easier for those less technically inclined. BTW 150 pages per minute is a conservative number! It really makes it easy to tame your private book collection. Their forum also has tips/tricks on how to process the resulting images into a clean digital version.

[kevinp]

Pretty neat. Don't think it would be worth my while to make one though. I've scanned a few books on a flatbed scanner and I've got a few more I'd like to do.

[rkomar]

How is 150 pages per minute possible? Even if it's two pages per shot, that's still better than 1 shot per second. You can barely flip the page that fast, let alone lower the book, raise the book and take the picture.

[Turtle91]

Doh!!! Units...units...units.

In the other forum we talked in pages per hour....several hundred...I just saw the 150 and thought - "that's low". Sorry.

However, with a little practice - and rubber-finger-page-turner-thingys (or clammy skin) you'd be really surprised how quickly you can get those pages flipping. They have some demo videos on the website that show people going at a reasonable rate.

[Turtle91]

For only a few books, it's definitely not worth it...unless you just like tinkering. But for those of us with a couple thousand it is definitely well worth the effort.

There is a push to get a scanner into local communities ("Hackerspaces" or "MakeLabs") - maybe even libraries?? - so individuals can use them.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

There is a push to get a scanner into local communities ("Hackerspaces" or "MakeLabs") - maybe even libraries?? - so individuals can use them.

Libraries? It's one thing to scan your own books - quite another to scan library books. That's just blatant copyright infringement.

[Mikou]

Having it in a library does not mean you'd be allowed to copy an entire library book. Every library I have visited has a copy machine available to patrons. You just have to pay for use for use of it (at prices that prohibit using it to pirate books) and it is usually located in view of the librarians. I would expect no less if a scanner were available.

[ghostyjack]

This may work on text but what about images?

[silverraven]

Maybe he means so you can bring your own books in to scan. Kind of like the die cutting machines at craft stores. You buy the material and they would let you use the machine. You didn't steal the material then use the machine.
S

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ghostyjack

This may work on text but what about images?

This is simply a device for mounting a camera for taking photographs of the pages of a book. What you then do with those photographs is entirely up to you, so it deals with images just as well as text - in fact everything ends up as an "image" - it doesn't do OCR for you.

[ghostyjack]

I know that it captures an image of the page and that this is just a mounting system. I was just hoping that someone who has performed a DIY book scan might be able to tell me if the images it captures from within the book (i.e. maps, etc, not the text) using similar techniques might be of good enough quality to include after I've OCR'ed the text.

I've never had any experience using a digital camera to try and photograph pictures within a book before - seeing as the only digital camera I own in in my phone, and I would not use that for capturing any fine detail from a page.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ghostyjack

I know that it captures an image of the page and that this is just a mounting system. I was just hoping that someone who has performed a DIY book scan might be able to tell me if the images it captures from within the book (i.e. maps, etc, not the text) useing similar techniques might be of good enough quality to include after I've OCR'ed the text.

I've never had any experience using a digital camera to try and photograph pictures within a book before - seeing as the only digital camera I own in in my phone, and I would not use that for capturing any fine detail from a page.

Sure - it works fine. I've taken my own photographs for the illustrations in some of the books I've uploaded to the MR library. The key thing is to have good, even, lighting of the page. I find that direct daylight works best.

[ghostyjack]

Thanks Harry.

I've got a paper book collection well in excess of a 1000 books and most are not yet available as ebooks and I was thinking about using a system like this to digitise them. Seeing as a lot of them included various pictures to enhance the stories, this was of great concern to me as I didn't want poor quality images in the ebooks to reduce my enjoyment of them.

I think now I might have a close look at getting one of these (or looking into the feasibility of designing my own).

[Kali Yuga]

$475 = around 40 scanned books, at $12/each.

150 pages an hour just to do the photos. Probably an hour to convert it to an image PDF. If I OCR it, that's going to take even more time.

I think I'll just keep the paper versions.