Digitising Paperbacks

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

Thanks, fjtorres and alecE.

Sure thing about the subcontracting possibility, fj. What do you think is a fair rate to pay?

Hi, Maggie:

I have a guy in the midwest who does this for my clients (rips books apart and scans them). He charges $0.47/page, and thats' the best rate I've found inside the US for good-quality work. He can output it pretty much however you want it (html, rtf, Word, whatever), and strip the page headers for you, also. Most other companies charge something around or higher than this, but I don't know about offshore.

HTH.

Hitch

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

Thanks, fjtorres and alecE.

Sure thing about the subcontracting possibility, fj. What do you think is a fair rate to pay?

Don't really know about rates; probably less than minimum wage if they're family.

We're talking an hour or so of page flipping per book...
What are matinee movie rates like in your area? I'd figure two books per movie ticket?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

My scanned PDFs without OCR are very readable. "Standard" sized paperbacks (roughly 4 1/4" x 6 7/8" are reasonably easy to read on the 6" Astak I have. I can read larger books (which results in finer print) but that's pushing the limit on my old eyes (I wear trifocals as it is). A 6" reader with persistant zoom would probably work well as would a 9". For now, I'm too cheap to pay for them until the price comes down (I would prefer to be able to stay with a 6" if possible; they are more purse friendly). On my 24" computer monitor from 2' or my 32" TV screen from 10', reading with Adobe is a breeze since I can zoom it to a comfortable size.

[Maggie Leung]

Thanks, Hitch, fjtorres and Lady Fitzgerald.

I'm not sure what matinee prices are, but I think the last movie I went to cost about 12 bucks.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

I'm not sure what matinee prices are, but I think the last movie I went to cost about 12 bucks.

Yeow.
Make that 4 books per movie, then.
(If you can't exploit relatives, who? )

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Yeow.
Make that 4 books per movie, then.
(If you can't exploit relatives, who? )

Lol.

[murraypaul]

As far as timings go, I'd figure for a standard small paperback (maybe 200-250 pages) about 2.5 hours to scan and OCR and then edit. That is roughly two thirds scan/OCR and a third edit/polish/convert. So if you were scanning to images you could skip most of the last time. I find that 300dpi black and white is fine for these sorts of books.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

If I'm not being distracted by something like the TV (face it, scsanning books, even with an ADF, is boring as watching grass grow), I can scan a 200-250 page book (without OCR) in in an average of 10-15 minutes, including scanning the covers in color, scanning the pages, combining the covers and pages, and checking for oddball margins. The only way I could do that with OCR in 2.5 hours (I'm slow) is to edit with a spell checker and accept there will be capitalization errors, etc. that a spell checker can't catch.

If doing only an occasional book, 2.5 hours might be acceptable but when one has a large number of books and/or larger books we are wanting to digitize, 2.5 hours becomes intolerable. My goal of finishing digitizing my book collection by the end of the year is possible when scanning without OCR (it always can be "OCRed" later). If I were to scan with OCR and editing, it would take me almost four years to finish. I'm 61; I don't have that kind of time.

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

If I'm not being distracted by something like the TV (face it, scsanning books, even with an ADF, is boring as watching grass grow), I can scan a 200-250 page book (without OCR) in in an average of 10-15 minutes, including scanning the covers in color, scanning the pages, combining the covers and pages, and checking for oddball margins. The only way I could do that with OCR in 2.5 hours (I'm slow) is to edit with a spell checker and accept there will be capitalization errors, etc. that a spell checker can't catch.

If doing only an occasional book, 2.5 hours might be acceptable but when one has a large number of books and/or larger books we are wanting to digitize, 2.5 hours becomes intolerable. My goal of finishing digitizing my book collection by the end of the year is possible when scanning without OCR (it always can be "OCRed" later). If I were to scan with OCR and editing, it would take me almost four years to finish. I'm 61; I don't have that kind of time.

That's really good to know. Ten to 15 minutes per book is about what I'd be willing to assign myself (or some kid). It would take forever to scan all my books, otherwise, and there's no point starting if I just end up running out of steam.

I'm pretty tolerant of spelling and punctuation errors, so I think I could make do with OK scans. I edit for a living and pretty much turn off my editing mode when it comes to leisure reading. Otherwise, errors would ruin reading for me.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

...I'm pretty tolerant of spelling and punctuation errors, so I think I could make do with OK scans. I edit for a living and pretty much turn off my editing mode when it comes to leisure reading. Otherwise, errors would ruin reading for me.

I'm intolerant of most spelling and punctuation errors--they would detract from my reading experience--so, since my scans are readable as is, I prefer to skip OCR, etc. and hold out for an affordable reader that can handle my PDFs as is.

[Iain]

...I'm pretty tolerant of spelling and punctuation errors, so I think I could make do with OK scans. I edit for a living and pretty much turn off my editing mode when it comes to leisure reading. Otherwise, errors would ruin reading for me.

I'm intolerant of most spelling and punctuation errors--they would detract from my reading experience--so, since my scans are readable as is, I prefer to skip OCR, etc. and hold out for an affordable reader that can handle my PDFs as is.

My initial tests were done with Iris software (free with my HP multifunction) targetted to 'readable pdf'. THis looked pretty much like the original book page even though there was selectable text in it. I suspect that this means that you would see the text as was even though the OCR might have mistaken some characters.

The point about this was that a two page scan took up 1.3MB rather than 11MB for an uncompressed TIF and 9 MB for a compressed TIF.

I guess I'm probably in the don't care about minor errors camp. However, I think I might keep the images of the first few dozen books until I'm sure it works well enough.

Iain

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Iain

The point about this was that a two page scan took up 1.3MB rather than 11MB for an uncompressed TIF and 9 MB for a compressed TIF.

Those files are all extremely large. What sort of resolution/colour depth are you scanning at?
For standard fiction 300dpi black and white is probably fine, and should give PNG files in the low 100s KB per double page.

[*reg*]

I think I need to get my eyes checked, when I first saw the thread tile I thought it said Disgusting Paperbooks