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Digitizing Your Dead Trees?
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?"
You can find a wealth of PDF/PS/HTML/etc copies of computer texts online. Kazaa is a good place to start. Obviously, only download the books you have physical copies of. :-)
Josh Woodward
Kinko's offers high-volume scan-to-PDF solutions ... at low volume, it is usually a 10 - 25 per page and the cost of the media to copy it to, but in large volume, sometimes the cost can go down to 1 per page.
Call Kinko's. Ask for the Territory Representative. They'll help you out!!!
Quite useful and handy.
D
Check the hardware list for sane and then pick one of the fastest scanners you can afford. The DB on Sane's web site is your best bet. You will find that to get good scanning speed you will need scsi as USB is just too slow.
jpeg also sucks for this. Jpeg is best for full color images like photographs. Better off using tiff or png. Most OCR software will require tiff. Don't know of any OCR software for linux although you might get some windows app to work under WINE. Textbridge from Xerox isn't bad for the money.
.....we use a xerox DC265ST. This digital photocopier scans pages at 65 per minute and posts them to an FTP server inhouse. It can scan at 300 or 600 DPI and you can apply OCR after the scans are done. The DC265 is a workhorse and there are about a million of them out there. The scan back feature is a additional price on the device so not everyone spent the money on that feature....but about 1000 Kinko's have these in house and a Kinko's with a good DTP department might actually even know how to use the feature. (Good Luck!)
.
Ignored Since 1973
if you are anything like the computer guys I know (myself included), you'd end up printing out
portions of the text whenever you wanted to read them anyway!!!
-- Adam
Yup. There is quite a lot already scanned. The best places to look are usenet (at alt.binaries.e-book, alt.binaries.e-book.technical, alt.binaries.e-books) and IRC at #bookwarez and #bookz on undernet, dalnet, and irc.nullus.net (and most likely other irc nets as well.)
You could try making a request in abeb, but the biggest selection in one place is irc. So as long as you are not scared by the interface, that is where I would look first.
O'Rielly (sp?) has many of their java books available on CD-ROM, although I only own the dead tree versions of the ones I have in that series.
.sig and buy some of my favorite books!) That a lot of weight for two books, and I usually haul around a couple smaller ones as well, O'Riely's perl book, and their EJB 3rd edition.
On a regular basis, I haul 2188 pages worth, I just added them up, of QUE's Using Java2 Standard Edition, and Enterprise edition, between home an the office. (Speaking of which, go to the link in my
Not only are all of these books heavy, but I have also yet to find an easy way to card them around, they don't all fit right in any of my bags.
I want all of these books on CD-ROM, but not just CD-ROM. Half the books I have INCLUDED a cd-rom, it just doesn't contain the texxt of the book. With O-Riely, I'd buy the CD-ROM version, but I want to dead tree version too. I want to use the dead tree version, unless I am working from home, I want to haul home the CD's. I don't think I should have to pay any more for it either, I bought the IP (in the property sense), and I am already paying the price for the wood slices, which includes a silver disk.
PUBLISHERS, GIVE ME THE BOOK ON THE CD TOO! I spend $100/month or so on tech books.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Anders Borg wrote this FAQ from Project Gutenberg. Lots of field-tested advice there, such as a suggestion to scan at 300dpi or better.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Dr Dobbs (and I'm sure others) offers CDs full of all their articles from the past couple years for a pretty good price (less than $100, I believe). They also offer collections of books on CD for about the cost of one original.
Just a thought,
hghWhat he's probably looking for is something like PDF. You can leave the image on the front (i.e., it's what shows up in acrobat reader), and adobe's ocr ocr's the document and and indexes it for searches. The problem with this is, you wind up with big pdf's with poor quality.
Where I work we tried to turn a book into PDF that we no longer had an electronic copy of. Keeping the images up front with ocr text behind, about 300 pages alltogether. Even with max compression, and the lowest acceptable DPI (300 I think), the PDF came out to 95MB. It didn't help that we scanned the book page by page and generated the PDF by hand, on a slow hp general consumer model scanner, either. (the initial pdf took over 120hrs to produce, with rescans and ocr'ing and everything).
We wound up taking the acrobat ocr'd text (it was better than the off the shelf ocr package we had at the time) via the adobe accessibility website, and fixing it up. It was a pretty big project.
We recently hired a document imaging company to PDF a lot of smaller historical documents for us, and that has worked out well. It's kind of pricey, but we also paid them to proof the ocr behind the images, and to hand adjust the images for appearance. It's worked out rather well.
Acrobat can do this. Just scan it in with Acrobat, then "capture text." Works well with good, clear fonts, and a straight scan (not crooked) from a good scanner, though there's like a 0.05% fail rate per character. Yes, I know that sucks, it's one error a page, but it's survivable.
You haven't seen fat until you see this.
Its https for some reason. Like someone is going to steal the fat recipies or something...
I do not have any experience with their products, but the solution offered by this company seems simple and functional. Their system consists of an apparatus that turns pages of your book automatically, scans, turns, scans, turns. The result you can naturally pass to OCR.
Now, if I was to digitize all my books, I would try to create te the 4DigitalBooks kind of solution myself. The only tricky part is to find a cheap enough way to turn pages automatically, see also Kris Mckenzie's automatic page turner, still the best start is this document which is a proposal and overview on how to create an automatic page turner from pieces, the total cost is $459.
My current setup consisits of:
4 HP scanners with ADF ~$150 ea. (eBay)
4 Sparc LXs from a property contol auction $50
one flatbed scanner for covers and bad scans. $50 (eBay again)
Barebones System/w scsi from Compgeeks $80
(NFS server), An Amtren Device(courtesy of the office) and away you go. I've found the best way to cut off the binders is to use a box cutter and to use your previous cuts as a guide. Several shell scripts to scan various types of books. It's amazing the page numbering schemes some publisers use. With this setup I can scan approximately 2-3 college textbooks 1000 pgs.(grayscale) or 1 color in an 10 hour period. (including checking for bad scans, sane ain't perfect, so you better check em) also jpg isn't very good for OCR, I store as png, and convert a second set to jpg for web viewing. OCR under linux isn't quite there yet (unless you want to pay through the nose) So I am Archiving the pngs to CD until it is. This also allows me to regenerate the jpgs if I lose a webserver disk. Add a nifty little IMageMagick web viewer and viola! eBookshelf! Oh and a NSM CD changer is nice too get to the CDs nearline.You can pick these up on ebay for $200-$400
First, I'd use PNG (lossless) or Photoshop's format(lossless) over JPEG (lossy). PNG/PSD will be crisper and color pictures will not be degraded.
:-/ )
;-) But really the problem I've run into is that the back of the pages tend to show through sometimes. You can help to alleviate this by rescanning the pages by hand. Place a blank piece of paper behind the page. This helps to make the page seem whiter to the scanner. If the paper is too bright then use a darker colored piece of paper (like grey or black). This will help the scanner to tone down the bright white of the paper. Only trial and error can tell you what you will need on a book by book basis. This is because each publisher uses a different brand of paper.
:-) Plastic rulers can also lead to problems. Use a metal one! Save time! Save going to the doctor for stitches! Keep those hard to get out red stains from appearing in your books!
Second, I'd make them HTML/PDF instead of plain text. Mainly because then you can retain the fonts. (Of course, some of the OCR programs will do this for you if you want to save it as MS-Word file but that's another story.
Fourth, a well scanned book is just as easy to read as the book itself. Honest!
Last, use an exacto knife to do the cutting and a good ruler with a metal edge. Exacto + wooden ruler means lots of splinters, badly cut pages, and sore thumbs/fingers.
Nuf Said!
Actually if sign this little buls**t form they have under the counter, they can copy whatever you want. I should know, I work there.
I highly suggest you consult an archivist or a librarian trained in archival management. Nineteenth century paper products are notorious fragile (a result of the switch from rag pulp to acidic, unstable wood pulp). If you don't have the facilities to store these properly, donating them to a local museum or archive is a wonderful idea.
The National Archives and Records Administration has a FAQ. Their advice on preserving family papers? --
Paper preservation requires proper storage and safe handling practices. Your family documents will last longer if they are stored in a stable environment, similar to that which we find comfortable for ourselves: 60-70 degrees F; 40-50% relative humidity (RH); with clean air and good circulation. High heat and moisture accelerate the chemical processes that result in embrittlement and discoloration to the paper. Damp environments may also result in mold growth and/or be conducive to pests that might use the documents for food or nesting material. Therefore, the central part of your home provides a safer storage environment than a hot attic or damp basement.
Light is also damaging to paper, especially that which contains high proportions of ultra violet, i.e., fluorescent and natural day light. The effects of light exposure are cumulative and irreversible; they promote chemical degradation in the paper and fade inks. It is not recommended to permanently display valuable documents for this reason. Color photocopies or photographs work well as surrogates.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
is http://docs.rinet.ru:8080/ - I ran across this site a few years back. It almost looks like an online library for a Russian ISP's technical support staff.
They've got lots and lots of official books, all HTMLized a chapter or a section at a time. They're all a bit old or out of date, too - I know of one Perl book in particular that they have there was one edition behind what was being sold on the shelf at the time I saw it.
-----
Is Darwin an evolutionary OS?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
If you really want to do it right, do it on film. Either pay someone or beg/borrow/steal a medium format camera and try to do it yourself. Film and archive quality prints will probably last longer than CDs and you can get good scans from the negatives if you want digital, too.
I beleive libraries use uncompressed TIFF files for digital archives.
You might find some discussions of this on photo.net
There are hundreds of them here. Very few are the kind of dopey software manuals you're referring to. Is that a "dearth?"
Find free books.
For bi-level images, the standard to use is JBIG, comes from an ISO group similar to those that created JPEG and MPEG.
It generates much smaller files than GIF for printed text, with none of the inconveniences of JPEG. Grey scale pictures come reasonably well, if done at 300 dpi, dithered.
I don't know exactly why JBIG never caught like those other standards. There doesn't seem to be many JBIG programs around, but, if you are handy with source code, there's jbigkit, a library for reading and writing JBIG files. I wrote my own software with that, and converted a half-ton of old magazines into a 20-pack caselogic of CD's.
For scanned documents, nothing can beat DjVu. Bitonal documents are 3 to 10 times smaller than with TIFF or PNG. Color documents are 5 to 10 times smaller than JPEG or PDF. There is a free online conversion service at Any2DjVu.
There is a free online conversion server at Any2DjVu.
Info can be found at DjVuZone.