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How to Make a Full Auto Book Scanner
- 6d0debc071 13y agoTalking of scanning machines, this is pretty cool: http://youtu.be/W1-2DmDmZgI http://youtu.be/W1-2DmDmZgI
- parkov 13y agoSpooky, by pure coincidence that video uses the same book (different edition) for their demo that my blog post does for 1DollarScan: http://thomaspark.me/2012/12/digitizing-books-on-the-cheap-and-easy/ http://thomaspark.me/2012/12/digitizing-books-on-the-cheap-a...
- stfu 13y agoI just love having all my books searchable, I use http://1dollarscan.com/ http://1dollarscan.com/ quite regularly for this purpose. It keeps these things really simple, esp. because it still takes me with regular book scanners (the non fully-automated ones) about half an hour scanning a 300 page book.
- KeithMajhor 13y agoI'd never heard of them before. I wonder if they keep the old scans and resell duplicate books. They could make a bunch of extra money on half.com or similar. Depending on how they're scanning the books it'd also save time. Then again, it could be that they're required to destroy the scanned book in order for it to be legal.
- breathesalt 13y agoHaving run a textbook scanning service (http://www.ptrfy.com/ http://www.ptrfy.com/) for a while now, I can say assuredly that keeping master digital copies or the physical processed books is a substantial legal liability.
- sdmn 13y agoWould it be possible to avoid the problem by storing scanned books in an encrypted form where the key is some words from random page?
- dbaupp 13y agoThe process to digitise it they use ends up partially destroying the book; at least, it removes the spine ("step 2" of http://1dollarscan.com/works.php http://1dollarscan.com/works.php). They do mention that they keep the book around for 2 weeks (to allow rescans) but then they recycle it. However, doing some more research, it seems that for certain items they can return it: Q. Are books ever returned? A. First of all, please understand that we do NOT return any books after they are scanned. The books are recycled after they are cut and this is part of our operation practice. The exceptions for returns are for photos, material you wrote yourself, material you own the copyright to and only a few more. If one of these exceptions or a similar exception applies to your order and you want the items returned, then please purchase a return option($5) at the time of your order. (http://1dollarscan.com/faq.php http://1dollarscan.com/faq.php)
- mmahemoff 13y agoReally wish this was around elsewhere. Apparently no such service exists in the UK, so when I purged all my dead trees, I just scanned the bar codes as I didn't have the time to scan the whole books (or figure out how to automate it).
- stfu 13y agoI often buy books directly from amazon.com (even used ones) and get the seller to ship them to 1$scan. By creating an account you get a personal ID and as long that is visible on the address label the book is filed under your account.
- WalterBright 13y agoMost of my books are far too old for bar codes.
- dunham 13y agoWish I knew about these guys a year ago, when I got rid of most of my books to make room for a nursery. My book search solution is to upload a list of ISBNs to google books and do "search within my library". It doesn't have full coverage, but is better than nothing.
- WalterBright 13y agoI've been scanning my (several thousand books) for over a year now. Using a flatbed scanner is completely impractical at 1 minute per page. I: 1. Use a stack slicer to cut the spine off 2. Feed it through a sheet feeding scanner 3. Check results 4. Do any necessary rescans and stitch the result together with pdftk 5. Chuck the (now destroyed) book into the recycling bin I have around 60Gb of books now, and have emptied many, many shelves and boxes. It's nice that I can now put my entire library onto my laptop. It doesn't take that long per book, maybe 5 minutes. The main time-wasters are when a book has damaged pages so the hopper feeder doesn't work right on it, or when the bookbinding glue has spread too far and pages are stuck together beyond where the spine cut was made. The hopper scanner will scan both sides at once in a couple seconds. I run the scanner at 400dpi, which is far better than any of the current ereaders will display them. But I figure it's future proofing them. My current ereader of choice is the Kobo Aura that has the retina e-ink display. It's well suited to reading scanned books because: 1. the retina display eliminates the jaggies 2. the glow screen works well in low light conditions 3. the larger screen size is suited to scanned book pages 4. the 32Gb microsd slot enables me to carry around at least half of my library :-)
- Luc 13y agoWhich scanner are you using, if I may ask?
- dewey 13y agoI prefer OPs method of digitalising the books. I'd feel bad for destroying the books and throwing them away instead of giving them away to some charity once I got my digital copy.
- WalterBright 13y agoAt first I felt terrible about destroying the books. All I can say is one can get used to anything :-) What helps is noticing that the vast majority go used on Amazon for less than a buck. Not even charities want to deal with those.
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- miles 13y agoFor fully automated, non-destructive scanning of rare books and the like, check out the APT BookScan 2400: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjm6dBNlPug http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjm6dBNlPug These guys (no affiliation) offer scanning services using the 2400: http://www.merrittgraphics.com/services/scanning/bookscan.php http://www.merrittgraphics.com/services/scanning/bookscan.ph...
- clebio 13y agoThat's awesome, how much ... wait, 'call us... download our credit application'?? Ouch, must be pricey.
- hdevalence 13y agoAccording to some documents I found with Google, one of those machines costs something like 100,000-120,000€.
- italophil 13y agoHa, who knew. Geocities lives on in Japan.
- michaelmior 13y agoThat was the first thing I noticed about this post! :)
- GICodeWarrior 13y agoThis scanner design from last year is pretty neat too. https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/ https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/
- pasbesoin 13y agoPartially OT: For people using Canon compact cameras together with the CHDK firmware in DIY imagers/scanners, which models are preferred these days? My A640 was stolen and I've been wondering what to replace it with.
- markvdb 13y agoHi! You want to look at the Canon PowerShot A810. That is what we currently ship our kits with at http://diybookscanner.eu http://diybookscanner.eu .