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Digitizing Your Dead Trees?

Posted by Cliff on from the when-you-can't-carry-them-with-you dept.

smart2000 asks: "I'm tired of lugging around dead trees. I've just moved offices and had to move over 100 pounds of 'essential' technical books. It is clear to me that the dead tree industry is never going to supply the books I want in electronic form, so it's time to do it myself. What hardware and software should I use?"

"The Plan: Take the binding of each book and cut it off. Feed into a scanner with duplex and cut-sheet feeder. Scan as a 300 DPI jpeg with compression. Then OCR them overnight. I don't expect the OCR to be perfect, just good enough to use as a searchable index.

What are the suitable scanner choices for Linux? Any recommendations for OCR software that will write in an open format? Has anyone done this before?"

7 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. An easier solution. by SystemFork · · Score: 4, Funny

    Lots of college students at $5/hour.

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  2. monkeys by blugecko · · Score: 4, Funny

    hire an infinite amount of monkeys on typewriters and... oh wait, that is for shakespeare

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  3. As Krow always says... by bdesham · · Score: 5, Funny

    You can't grep a dead tree.

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  4. 100 pounds? by NineNine · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's it? Jesus, what are you, a 12 year old girl? That's 2 armloads. Sounds like you need the exercise, fatass.

    1. Re:100 pounds? by zulux · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's it? Jesus, what are you, a 12 year old girl?

      Girl? On Slashdot?

      Woah!

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    2. Re:100 pounds? by mikeage · · Score: 5, Funny

      Jesus, what are you, a 12 year old girl

      To the best of my knowledge, Jesus was not a 12 year old girl.

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  5. Free the monkeys! by sydb · · Score: 4, Funny

    Isn't an infinte number of computers enough?

    cat /dev/random > ebooks

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