I built a tool to help with scanning books in a more efficient manner: http://github.com/jbaiter/spreads http://github.com/jbaiter/spreads http://spreads.read

I built a tool to help with scanning books in a more efficient manner: http://github.com/jbaiter/spreads http://github.com/jbaiter/spreads http://spreads.readthedocs.org http://spreads.readthedocs.org With it, going from a physical book to a digitized, postprocessed and OCRed PDF takes around 30-40 minutes for an average 300-400pg book with no pictures/illustrations. My (rather lofty, I ad mit) motivation was to make it as easy as possible for people to free printed information from their pyhsical shackles and enable them to share it (I'm currently working on a plugin that allows the user to directly upload a scanned book to the Internet Archive). The inspiration for it came after I purchased a kit for Daniel Reeds' incredible DIYBookScanner[1] and built it on a free weekend. Upon toying with it, I realized that, while there was a lot of great software available for helping with the scanning and postprocessing, using it required a lot of often tedious manual interactions that could easily be automated. The tool basically handles all communication with the capture devices (cameras, but the code is kept rather general as to allow for the usage of mobile phones or flatbed scanners) and calls a bunch of 3rd party applications to deal with postprocessing and output generation. I learned a lot about multithreading/multiprocessing in Python, got to brush up my PySide knowledge and am currently learning AngularJS by developing a webinterface for it, to allow the headless control of Raspberry Pi-connected scanners. [1] http://www.diybookscanner.org/ http://www.diybookscanner.org/