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DIY Book Scanner
- jbaiter 3y agoWriting the software for an earlier version of this was one of the first open source projects I ever did, with an early 0.1x release of React, fond memories So great to see the project is still alive.
- daniel_reetz 3y ago"alive" is a strong word but I am keeping it online as long as possible. miss ya old friend
- textfiles 3y agoShout out to you, my boy
- pronoiac 3y agoYay, the forum is back online!
- daniel_reetz 3y agoLots of work behind the scenes. Welcome back.
- ethanpil 3y agoRemember when Google was cool and not evil and released their book scanner project for free? https://code.google.com/archive/p/linear-book-scanner/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/linear-book-scanner/ "Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate this design..."
- mdaniel 3y agoThe link that's less likely to be sunset due to someone's random whims: https://github.com/google/linear-book-scanner#readme https://github.com/google/linear-book-scanner#readme
- BeetleB 3y agoThe original creator of this had to suspend all activities when he got a job at Apple. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27364737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27364737
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoApple I believe says this in their contracts but in California (idk if this worker was in CA) it’s illegal to prevent employees from working on projects on personal time using personal resources, aside from maybe carve outs for competing things. It actually really sucks that apple acts like workers can’t moonlight, I’ve had some friends who didn’t do it out of fear of retribution despite it being enshrined in CA law.
- aidenn0 3y agoWell, what's a related field? Apple has a store that sells eBooks...
- bluGill 3y agoDoes the guy work in that bookstore? If he is in a different dapartment he is probably okay.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoThis article says the exemptions include, among other things: “The nature of moonlighting work is in direct conflict with the company. For example, working with or providing consultations to competitors, competing for an employer’s clients, or activities that harm the goodwill or reputation of your employer.” https://www.aegislawfirm.com/blog/2023/01/california-moonlighting-law/ https://www.aegislawfirm.com/blog/2023/01/california-moonlig... I think it would be hard to argue that a book scanner competes with an online ebook store, since one is an archival tool and one is a commercial store. Someone could host illegal copies of copyrighted works and they would be competing with apple’s legitimate work, but those people would be the ones competing with apple, not the creator of a tool they used in the process.
- Syzygies 3y agoThis should be easier in software, reconstructing a 3D model of the relaxed open book from a stereo or multiple photos, then using AI to "upsample" to the scalable PDF document most likely to produce the modeled image. I was part of a font consulting company during the Postscript / Truetype font wars, and we reconstructed fonts from scans or earlier digital formats. Most of the work was fixing bad data. This all should be easier now; think of Peter Jackson cleaning up the "Let It Be" sound, leading to the Beatles releasing one more track. It baffles me that book images don't get this quality of attention. As a mathematician I spend a lot of time reading old journal articles that look terrible.
- jzb 3y agoFrom the front page of the link: “The easiest way to avoid page curl in your images is to flatten the pages by pressing them against glass or acrylic. While there are some computer algorithms that can help dewarp the pages after capture, it is always more reliable to just capture flat pages in the first place.”
- KolmogorovComp 3y agoCool to see this reposted! I see on the forums are using dedicated compact cameras. Are they still better than smartphones? I also wonder if using the LIDAR from iPhones for example could significantly improve the flattening process.
- mdaniel 3y agoThe submission from 2021 with quite a bit of commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27361815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27361815
- jerdthenerd 3y agoI was interested to see how they solved automated page turning... but none of the designs appear to address this? Sounds like a repetitive motion injury waiting to happen after you get done scanning Fountainhead.
- cf1241290841 3y agoFully automatic ones do exist, but its generally not done to not risk damage to the books. And without ocr of page numbers you always risked missing pages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvM-tjrS2-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvM-tjrS2-U That said, a lot of automation processes in place do destroy the book by cutting the spine and scanning it.
- westurner 3y ago"Ask HN: What's the best out-of-box Document OCR/Analyzing/recognition API?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829242 ; BetterOCR : > Better text detection by combining multiple OCR engines (EasyOCR, Tesseract, and Pororo) FWIU there's a way to image multiple stacked sheets of ancient scrolls without unrolling them?
- zwayhowder 3y agoI made one of these during my MBA. I spent close to $2000AUD including the two Nikon mirrorless cameras I purchased. I am not particularly handy and made it out of spare 2x4 lumber I had so it wasn’t light. But it worked, I scanned about two dozen short term library books that I needed to reference frequently during my course at a cost of about $85 per book. If I’d purchased the time limited ebooks they would have cost $125 each, and been scattered across 3 different bookstore apps. I would scan while watching tv and could do approx 1000 pages per hour. I also learned that I should not do carpentry and potentially saved tens of thousands by hiring a handyman or carpenter for home diy…
- cf1241290841 3y agoThere is an amazing one using plastic plumbing pipes still on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns3jGFbJvXI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns3jGFbJvXI
- zwayhowder 3y agoSomeone at the time had a CNC aluminium one on ebay for $700 or so. I thought "I can do that cheaper". I was very wrong. The actual parts weren't too bad.(I still had to spend $1400 on the cameras IIRC), but the number of tools I didn't own was a lot higher than I expected. Still no regrets, I had a fun week of arts and crafts and got to stick it to Elsevier and other academic publishers :D
- cf1241290841 3y agoIt does sound like an amazing project you did there. You are also making a very good point with the surprising effort and equipment this can take. I ran into trouble just fixing something on a heatsink the other day. Turns out in addition to drill, drillbit and tapping set i really need something to keep the drill straight :)
- dang 3y agoRelated: DIY Book Scanner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27361815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27361815 - June 2021 (124 comments, and btw a great thread) DIY book scanning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991897 - Dec 2009 (7 comments)
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoThat guy posted this on here when it was new. Also he's from my town
- jareklupinski 3y agowith the methods that hopefully come out of that research project that aims to read those really old scrolls that can't be touched or opened... maybe we'll find a method for "CT scanning" a book and using imaging techniques to reconstruct the text inside without needing to flip each page?
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago> maybe we'll find a method for "CT scanning" a book and using imaging techniques to reconstruct the text inside without needing to flip each page YES! Quite literally what's happenening here, albeit in a different context: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/arts/design/herculaneum-scroll-vesuvius-word-purple.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/12/arts/design/herculaneum-s...
- WalterBright 3y agoJust slice the spine off, and run it through a sheet fed scanner. I know, I know - Sacrilege! But you can also just set the book on a table, open it, and photograph it with your phone camera. The result is perfectly legible on your monitor.
- lotophage 3y agoI love the idea (as long as they are not rare out of print books). Then burn the loose pages of all the books you've scanned in a bonfire to complete the ritual. The books have now transcended the physical realm and it felt really wrong while doing it. History warns us that people will be next, are they right?
- WalterBright 3y agoRare out of print books are, of course, rare. The vast bulk are relatively worthless in the used market.
- Telemakhos 3y agoI once asked a special collections librarian in the US to scan a rare book. This is a perfectly normal, common practice in some libraries; for example, I've gotten scans of rare books in a library in Salzburg e-mailed to me for something like twenty euros. This one librarian, however, hadn't heard of that, and the only method he could think of to do it was the one you suggest—slicing the spine and running the pages through a multi-page scanner, and he was horrified at the idea. A long and frustrating conversation ensued as I tried to convince him that I was not trying to get him to destroy rare books in order to digitize them.
- neilv 3y ago> If you have a healthy budget, just buy DSLR cameras and use those. Do these scanning rigs lock the mirror and shutter of the DSLR? If not, what MTBF are they looking at, when prosumer DSLR shutter life might be around 50K actuations?
- Paul-Craft 3y ago> A "good" shutter count varies depending on the camera model. Entry-level and mid-range DSLR cameras typically have a shutter count rating between 100,000 and 200,000, while professional-grade cameras can range between 400,000 and 500,000. When purchasing a second-hand camera, it's best to choose one with shutter count well below its rating. https://checkshuttercount.com/nikon https://checkshuttercount.com/nikon
- neilv 3y agoI don't know what's accurate. This top-search-hit other site has some "Average number of actuations after which shutter died" data is for some older models. Consumer (lowest, 69K): https://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/canon_eos1000d.htm https://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/canon_eos1000d.htm Prosumer (98K): https://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/canon_eos30d.htm https://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/canon_eos30d.htm That's average, so, if that data is reasonably representative of units in the the wild (I don't know), I'd think a trustworthy rating (and safe expectation) would be lower than that. The reasons I mentioned shutter life was because I wanted to know how the scanning projects using DSLRs managed that, and also, to suggest to anyone dropping money on a DSLR for this that shutter life might be a cost consideration.
- nforgerit 3y agoWith Covid lockdowns I got a bit depressed and decided to give up my flat to travel around. When I looked at my bookshelf it broke my heart to give away/sell all my books, so I remembered the old story about Brin/Mayer (afair) at Google trying out how long it takes to photograph a book. I did the same just with my bare hands and my smartphone with a rather short book and calculated it would take me ~2 weeks to create an imperfect (thumbs included) digitized copy of all my books. So that's what I did, eventually improving upon things: - took a grill from the oven which stabilized the phone and relieved my arm - created a couple of bash scripts to automate slicing and image compression - run tesseract-ocr (fulltext search) - ghostscript for making it a pdf All automated and improved over time. No big bang, just trial and error and tiny steps. Meanwhile I have hundreds of books. They're not perfect but perfectly readable/searchable. Why I am telling you this? Keep it simple. Unless you're more interested in engineering the "machine" than the actual product it's supposed to create.
- is_true 3y agoWasn't searching LibGen more efficient?
- phs318u 3y agoFor anyone who thinks this is a facetious response, I've done exactly this - use LibGen to find far more useful (to me) formats of books that I own physically. I don't see why I should be punished because I purchased the book in an age where electronic copies were not available. The author and/or their estate have gotten their fair share from me already.
- angra_mainyu 3y agoLibGen and the associated SciHub are truly some of the best projects to ever exist.
- yowlingcat 3y agoThat grill trick is a neat discovery. Makes sense that it would do the job as a stabilizer, but it's a clever reuse of some thing most of us have lying around the house. I bet you could use a similar kind of a setup with a baking drying rack to mount a smartphone on motors and rotate the thing in multiple dimensions, but perhaps by that point there's a better approach.
- cf1241290841 3y agohttps://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=9034 https://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=9034 External power for the cameras is quite neat. edit: In case anyone is curious, for battery replacements the term is (dual) "battery eliminator"
- emtrw 3y agoIt's getting to the point that we need this again. Ebooks are basically all epub and that's completely useless for type setting. I've had to contact authors of textbooks to try and get the latex source so I can read what the damned thing says on a screen.
- indianmouse 3y agoIs there a kit that can be bought online? I may not have the time and energy to do a DIY, but have an immediate requirement to procure one. Any leads / directions / websites would be really appreciated. Thank you!
- ChadNYC 3y agohttps://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=28 https://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=28
- indianmouse 3y agoThanks and really appreciate it. But none of them are available or selling it currently. Also, the forum looks dead / defunct. No noticeable activity on any thread! Sad to see such a vibrant community gone extinct. I know it is not an active area unlike other DIY and the requirements are also very low. But still....!
- treetalker 3y agoNot a DIY kit, but in case LibGen is insufficient and you need a commercially available solution, ScanSnap scanners have a model for this purpose. https://www.pfu-us.ricoh.com/scanners/scansnap/sv600 https://www.pfu-us.ricoh.com/scanners/scansnap/sv600 The software has automatic page-turn detection (so you don’t have to repeatedly press the scan button); has page-curve correction and deskew; and automatically removes fingers/thumbs from the image, in case you need to hold the pages down. Neat! Like another commenter, I used 1dollarscan to digitize many books (to save space) but I agree that that process was more expensive than expected (and destroyed my physical books, which I have come to regret). If I had known about the scanner I just linked to, I probably would have invested in one instead. Off-topic, but apparently Ricoh has acquired the ScanSnap brand from Fujitsu. (News to me, at least.) But unless Ricoh has changed something, in my experience it’s hard to go wrong with the ScanSnap brand for personal scanning needs. (I have no affiliation with the companies or brands mentioned.)
- grumpyfox96 3y agoThere is this classic – very very impressive but to my knowledge not commercially available and probably never commercialized. 250 pages/min is astounding. https://youtu.be/03ccxwNssmo https://youtu.be/03ccxwNssmo
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mvelbaum 3y agoI used to use a flatbed scanner back in my undergrad, was quite a painful experience :). Nowadays I just use https://1dollarscan.com https://1dollarscan.com. Turns out to be rather expensive, but still beats all that manual work.
- dah00pl3 3y agoI saw this and immediately looked to see if someone had finally posted instructions on making a GrumbleGear 3000 scanner (Robin Sloan's "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore").