Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Looks costly and subject to mechanical issues.
I bought an overhead scanner, mostly to digitize sheet music. It doesn't actually 'scan', rather captures image with a camera. The material does not need to be perfectly flat, just flat enough so the camera can peer into the crevice of an open book. Then software de-skews the image to restore the proper geometry. It has multiple LED lights to eliminate shadows and they sell a fold-up light box that goes over everything, with interior reflective surface to further even out the light and ensure the best results.
You still have to physically turn pages, it will detect page turns automatically, or you can use the supplied foot switch to trigger capture. In theory it will do an entire book in the time it takes you to turn pages. Of course you need to develop some technique.
The real work comes after the scanning is done: verify everything looks good, rescan pages that aren't, organizing and tagging the content, and storing the digital files somewhere.
I have yet to use it for a real project, but I think it's better than anything out there for under $500. My only worry is that there is no 3rd party software that works with it:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JMTPJ8S/
I don't think I'll be scanning books with it, but there might be a few exceptions. I haven't even gotten started with the sheet music.
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I bought one of these a few years ago to digitise some of my older SF novels that aren't available as ebooks (because I hate reading paper books so much now). It works, but it's a right pain for paperback books as they don't want to stay open enough to take a good picture. I did one book and that was enough for me. And as you say the clean up work after is worse than the scanning.
Andrew
PS This used to be the go to place for book scanning but it looks like the web site is fast succumbing to bit rot:
https://www.diybookscanner.org/