8 ms·
Build a better Bookshelf
- bklaasen 8y agoCamScanner[1] on Android does a very nice job of this kind of work. I'm not associated with the product, just a longtime satisfied user. [1] https://www.camscanner.com/ https://www.camscanner.com/
- yumraj 8y agoHmmm, should I use a document scanner application, made by a company in China, after the recent discovery of numerous applications on iOS and OSX sending data to China..... Sure, why not.... /sarcasm
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hirundo 8y agoGreat idea. Someone please build a public database of tables of contents and indexes, keyed by ISBN, so we can skip the scanning and OCR steps. And dear publishers: when this database emerges please add to it as you publish new works. Thanks.
- jacques_chester 8y agoGoogle Books more or less did this already, with mixed results.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agomixed results engendered by lawsuit.
- amelius 8y agoThe lawsuits were only there because Google published the entire contents of all scanned books. But I guess making available only the index would fall under fair use. IANAL though.
- jen729w 8y agoEat Your Books [0] is amazing for this, but is limited to the cookery world. You tell it what books you own. It knows what’s in them but does not show you the contents. You search for whatever you have in the fridge. It tells you to go to book x, page y, and there’s the recipe. Oh, and it includes magazines. [0]: https://www.eatyourbooks.com/ https://www.eatyourbooks.com/
- yesenadam 8y agoHmm and to add more than 5 cookbooks you have to pay.. :-(
- efields 8y agoPaying for a service! Wow!
- yesenadam 8y agoDon't be snarky. I liked the idea, but really, not nearly enough to pay to index my cookbooks.
- reitanqild 8y agoSo how do you prefer the company collects money to pay their expenses?
- horsawlarway 8y agoSo why do you suppose he should care? It's not his business to figure out how they pay their expenses. It's his business to make value judgements for himself. He decided this service wasn't worth the cost.
- reitanqild 8y agoAs long as the pricing is right I appreciate that alternative. We complain a lot here (and to a certain degree, righly so) here on HN about annoying ads and creepy tracking so I will try to e positive when someone actually honestly makes a great product and asks for money instead of trying to extract it from profiling me and selling the profile.
- Zanni 8y agoGreat idea. Even if it's not fair use (as amelius suggests below), I can imagine a lot of publishers would get on board, especially for technical books. It would increase the value of books that you buy, and if you search books you didn't own, point you to books you might want to buy.
- adamnemecek 8y agoI’ve found books.google.com be alright for this as well.
- metaphor 8y agoThe author specifically noted: And the search result is limited to just my books, not the whole internet, that's the point of scanning instead of Googling.
- hannasanarion 8y agoAnd the above commenter specifically noted I’ve found books.google.com be alright for this as well. Google Books doesn't index the internet. It indexes books. Including using OCR.
- lethologica 8y agobooks.google.com is mostly every book ever printed. Keeping it to your local bookshelf means you'll actually have access to these books.
- metaphor 8y agoConsider for a moment the critical difference between my books on my bookshelves and Google-indexed books in the ether.
- diymaker 8y agoYou can only search books you own by adding it your library in Google Books. This should limit it to returning results only from books you have.
- metaphor 8y agoThe problem with Google Books is search capability within "your library" really has no way to constrain itself to tables of contents and/or indices; even advanced search falls flat on its face by this measure and generally sucks hind tit by every other. I'm just imagining running a search query for "recursion" only to have Hofstadter and Wolfram comprise 90%+ of the return. Even if full search capability is what you really want, you're limited to ebooks for which digital rights are established via Google Play purchase. For everything else that isn't acknowledged public domain, you'll get a tease preview without even a hint of completeness...if you get anything at all. Invested in a Kindle digital library? I'm liable to suspect Google gave users vested in Amazon DRM a gratuitous GTFO-not-in-my-backyard finger. Then there's the issue of specific revisions, e.g. it doesn't matter that Google Books shows skant preview of 4e Sedra/Smith when 5e is on my bookshelf--which, oh by the way, doesn't have preview. Then there's the issue of copyright lockdown, e.g. only one of Carroll Smith's popular ...to Win series has any preview; the others are on lockdown. Same with Milliken on vehicle dynamics, Katz on aerodynamics, and many other titles published by SAE. (Observe how the thematic high mark we've been striving for is a mere preview.) Which brings up the issue of availability, e.g. good lucking trying to find the Institute of Navigation's canonical GPS red books in a Google Books query, or specific translations of the Bhagavad Gita, or other rare publications that an archivist would generally not hesitate to shoot you dead if caught attempting to adulterate in a scanner. Surely I'm not the only person on HN who maintains a tangible library that's 1000+ large and growing. Like the author, I care about what's in my library, not what Google Books superficially pretends to offer as a front to getting me to purchase books in the digital (when available) that I've already paid handsomely for. Amazon and eBay combined see roughly 70% of my bookshelves. Even if Google Books did a fair job by some objective measure, I neither need nor desire their service.
- antoineMoPa 8y agoThe fact that we have to scan any technical book published after 1980 is a distortion of capitalism. The obvious most efficient solution for everyone would be to have the darn fully searchable digital version of the book + the source code.
- brian_cloutier 8y agoIt's plausible that the fact we have so many amazing technical books is also a "distortion of capitalism". The obvious most efficient course of action is to not write a book.
- sdenton4 8y agoBut books predate capitalism as well... Dating back to times when writing or copying them was even less efficient...
- sdenton4 8y ago(should have included this link...) http://catandgirl.com/one-panel-every-250-years-since-30000-bc/ http://catandgirl.com/one-panel-every-250-years-since-30000-...
- ChristianGeek 8y agoI’d rather scan the whole book and replace my library with an iPad. In fact, I’ve already done that. With over 1,000 books on my iPad it’s the only reason I’m still married.
- notadog 8y agoI find it cool that this blog post was originally sketched by hand: https://huytd.github.io/img/handwritten-build-a-better-bookshelf.jpg https://huytd.github.io/img/handwritten-build-a-better-books...
- huydotnet 8y agoThanks :D if you go to the homepage, there are some other sketches as well
- kev009 8y agoDoes anyone have any experience with book scanning in general? I've been eyeballing a unit from "CZUR" but am a bit skeptical of the product in general. I would prefer to buy something more generic/high end HW wise like a V-shaped scanner where you bring your own DSLRs but can't find out if there is a serious open source software platform for them.
- j88439h84 8y agohttps://www.diybookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/
- Nzen 8y agoI plan to build a [linear book scanner](https://linearbookscanner.org/ https://linearbookscanner.org/) someday. I admit it doesn't satify OP's concern though, at it uses two upward-facing flatbed scanners, rather than consumer cameras.
- zwayhowder 8y agoI made a hardware DIY Book scanner and run it off a Rpi using https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan with two Nikon J1 cameras. If you're not an experienced handy-person be prepared for frustration and spending more than you think on tools. Otherwise very happy with the result and experience. I can scan about 800 pages per hour currently. Once scanned I use scan tailor to adjust the pages then a small script to tesseract OCR them before creating a PDF. I typically do all the scanning while watching Netflix as it doesn't require a lot of attention once you get in the flow.
- allenleein 8y agoThanks for sharing it!
- computator 8y agoWhat a shame that people have to use homebrew methods to duplicate the effort that someone (Google) has already done with vastly greater resources. Google Books, a.k.a., Google Book Search, has already scanned and OCR'ed about 20% of all books in existence -- i.e., 25 million of an estimated 130 million books. So, "somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them."[1] I understand the legal issues, authors not getting compensated, etc., but it's still a shame that it actually exists but it's inaccessible (except for snippets). [1] https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-of-university-library-books https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-goo...
- pimlottc 8y agoI was actually hoping this was about actually building your own DIY bookshelf (for actual physical books)...
- killaken2000 8y agoHa! Me too. I was expecting some kind of analysis of the perfect shelf material and optimum depth and height of each shelf based on the number of books by genre and their dimensions.
- huydotnet 8y agoHa! I don't even have a proper bookshelf :(
- Maxion 8y agoHa! I am making some shelves for myself and spent the weekend measuring the dimensions and weight of all of my books to later divide into different bins based on height, depth and weight (density).
- Freak_NL 8y agoI ended up with four different shelve heights based on my measurements (paperbacks, hardcovers, misc., and art-books), and used the classical technique of bird's beak shelving supports to make all shelves configurable. Finished bookcase: https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/885499829052485632 https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/885499829052485632 The four common shelve-heights I chose are 4, 5, 6, or 7 bird's beak 'units' spaced apart vertically. You can see the configurable parts here: https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/876126132734656514 https://twitter.com/jdhoek/status/876126132734656514
- _mrmnmly 8y agolove the color!
- 8y ago
- cryptozeus 8y agoGreat idea !
- 2to15characters 8y agoThis reminds me of Bret Victor’s Bookcase which displays the sections “highlighted” by projecting them on a wall and navigating to that page on an iPad.
- freetonik 8y agoOfftopic: huydotnet, would you consider adding RSS to your blog? I'd like to subscribe, but couldn't find a link anywhere, including the source code of the page. It seems like you're generating pages from Org mode. I've recently discovered ox-hugo, maybe it'll be of interest to you too. I wrote about my setup here https://rakhim.org/2018/09/moved-from-jekyll-to-hugo-and-ox-hugo/ https://rakhim.org/2018/09/moved-from-jekyll-to-hugo-and-ox-...
- huydotnet 8y agoNice, I'm trying to figure out a way to generate RSS from my org notes. Reading your post now :D Thank you so much :+1:
- stevehawk 8y agoAre there multiple versions of the current OneNote? I can't OCR anything in my version for Windows 10. I'm stuck like this guy - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onenote-mso_win10-msoversion_other/onenote-ocr-not-working/e239c9ea-e1b3-46c3-a976-45a418231dbc https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...
- Dagonfly 8y agoAFAIK, OCR is only available in OneNote 2016 (i.e. through a licence or Office 365), but not in the OneNote UWP app, which you get for free in the Windows Store. Edit: Though, if you imported the Image/Print in OneNote 2016 you can search the OCR result in OneNote UWP and access it using Right-Click -> Picture -> Alt Text
- huydotnet 8y agoI think the free version also has it, I'm using OneNote with my personal account, and I never pay for it.