4 ms·

What technique are you using to digitize these books? I'd be interested in digitizing a few books I have.

by floren 7y ago

ChuckMcM 7y ago
I have a Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 and a heavy duty paper guillotine (basically a very sharp, very tall blade, kind of like this one on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/B00NO7PYYI https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/...). The ScanSnap came with a license to Abbyy's OCR software (which is good for words but it makes for interesting jumbles when you have tables and of course no math recognition). And the Foxit PDF editor version. Since most of the text books I've scanned are hard covers I cut off the covers, scan those on flatbed scanner, then disassemble the binding to remove the pages. Cut off the margins to get to something closer to 8.5" wide (more modern text books have been "experimenting" with page sizes). Disassembly takes about 20 minutes, scanning takes another, 10 minutes depending on how many sets I need to scan (the paper feeder for the ScanSnap is nominally 75 pages, but if it gets overloaded can misfeed). Occasionally I'll get a misfeed (two pages feed at the same time) and I generally clean the paper handling belts every 10 or 15 books because they get accumulation that make them less effective at gripping the paper.
- floren 7y ago
  Ah, I should have guessed it would be a destructive process. Still something I'll keep in mind but I have a particular weakness about destroying old books, even if intellectually I understand 1) it's not a valuable book and 2) there are other copies out there and 3) it's worth more to me in PDF form.
  - kragen 7y ago
    The process used by the Internet Archive and Google for digitizing books is nondestructive; the Archive open-sourced the plans for their "Scribe" book-scanning machine, and others have made downloadable plans for laser-cuttable versions. It's slower than running a destroyed book through a sheeet-fed scanner (typically you get on the order of ten two-page scans per minute), but it's suitable even for rare books.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    I completely understand that sentiment! I definitely have books that I keep because they are valuable to me both as a book and as the information they contain. Textbooks, are by their nature, more 'conduits of information' than works of art. (TAOCP not withstanding). Also they get regularly re-issued in order to be resold to students so their knowledge is more widely dispersed than many books. When I was at Google I visited the book scanning operation a couple of times and they had these machines that would photograph a page, dewarp, and some of them even turn the page (some required a person to turn the pages). While I would love to have such a capability, the only way I could justify it would be to have texts I needed to add to my data set that were not mine to destroy. My work-around for this issue so far has been to find and buy a second copy of a book on the used market to digitize, best of both worlds for me in that situation.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    Non-destructive scanning is very much an option, but it's slower, more expensive and requires a bulky rig. It's probably only worth the effort if you're a serious data hoarder. If you have a handful of precious books that you really can't bear to cut up, commercial non-destructive scanning services are available at ~$30 per book. https://linearbookscanner.org/ https://linearbookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/
    - OJFord 7y ago
      Only $30? (No missing 0?) That's on average (assuming a range of novels to textbooks thay makes the average...) only doubling the book cost to get a copy in another format. Not ideal (IMO buying the physical book should entitle you to a zero marginal cost PDF copy too, which some publishers do adhere to) but certainly better than I expected.

What technique are you using to digitize these books? I'd be interested in digitizing a few books I have.

by floren 7y ago

What technique are you using to digitize these books? I'd be interested in digitizing a few books I have.

I have a Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 and a heavy duty paper guillotine (basically a very sharp, very tall blade, kind of like this one on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/B00NO7PYYI https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/...). The ScanSnap came with a license to Abbyy's OCR software (which is good for words but it makes for interesting jumbles when you have tables and of course no math recognition). And the Foxit PDF editor version. Since most of the text books I've scanned are hard covers I cut off the covers, scan those on flatbed scanner, then disassemble the binding to remove the pages. Cut off the margins to get to something closer to 8.5" wide (more modern text books have been "experimenting" with page sizes). Disassembly takes about 20 minutes, scanning takes another, 10 minutes depending on how many sets I need to scan (the paper feeder for the ScanSnap is nominally 75 pages, but if it gets overloaded can misfeed). Occasionally I'll get a misfeed (two pages feed at the same time) and I generally clean the paper handling belts every 10 or 15 books because they get accumulation that make them less effective at gripping the paper.

floren 7y ago
Ah, I should have guessed it would be a destructive process. Still something I'll keep in mind but I have a particular weakness about destroying old books, even if intellectually I understand 1) it's not a valuable book and 2) there are other copies out there and 3) it's worth more to me in PDF form.
- kragen 7y ago
  The process used by the Internet Archive and Google for digitizing books is nondestructive; the Archive open-sourced the plans for their "Scribe" book-scanning machine, and others have made downloadable plans for laser-cuttable versions. It's slower than running a destroyed book through a sheeet-fed scanner (typically you get on the order of ten two-page scans per minute), but it's suitable even for rare books.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  I completely understand that sentiment! I definitely have books that I keep because they are valuable to me both as a book and as the information they contain. Textbooks, are by their nature, more 'conduits of information' than works of art. (TAOCP not withstanding). Also they get regularly re-issued in order to be resold to students so their knowledge is more widely dispersed than many books. When I was at Google I visited the book scanning operation a couple of times and they had these machines that would photograph a page, dewarp, and some of them even turn the page (some required a person to turn the pages). While I would love to have such a capability, the only way I could justify it would be to have texts I needed to add to my data set that were not mine to destroy. My work-around for this issue so far has been to find and buy a second copy of a book on the used market to digitize, best of both worlds for me in that situation.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  Non-destructive scanning is very much an option, but it's slower, more expensive and requires a bulky rig. It's probably only worth the effort if you're a serious data hoarder. If you have a handful of precious books that you really can't bear to cut up, commercial non-destructive scanning services are available at ~$30 per book. https://linearbookscanner.org/ https://linearbookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/ https://www.diybookscanner.org/
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Only $30? (No missing 0?) That's on average (assuming a range of novels to textbooks thay makes the average...) only doubling the book cost to get a copy in another format. Not ideal (IMO buying the physical book should entitle you to a zero marginal cost PDF copy too, which some publishers do adhere to) but certainly better than I expected.