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With 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 al

With 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 ago
Wasn't searching LibGen more efficient?
- phs318u 3y ago
  For 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 ago
  LibGen and the associated SciHub are truly some of the best projects to ever exist.
yowlingcat 3y ago
That 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.
- whycome 3y ago
  I cannot picture how a grillwould be used
  - nforgerit 3y ago
    Well you can lie down the phone on the grill without the camera lenses getting covered. Then you build some kinds of pillars (anything; I just used 2 stacks of books on each side) and put the grill with the phone on top. Then with one hand I released the trigger and with the other hand I turned the pages. It worked surprisingly well.

is_true 3y ago

Wasn't searching LibGen more efficient?

phs318u 3y ago
For 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 ago
LibGen and the associated SciHub are truly some of the best projects to ever exist.

yowlingcat 3y ago

That 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.

whycome 3y ago
I cannot picture how a grillwould be used
- nforgerit 3y ago
  Well you can lie down the phone on the grill without the camera lenses getting covered. Then you build some kinds of pillars (anything; I just used 2 stacks of books on each side) and put the grill with the phone on top. Then with one hand I released the trigger and with the other hand I turned the pages. It worked surprisingly well.