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?"

Comments

Re:Go To Kinko's!!!!

[Microsift]

I seriously doubt Kinko's would do this. They are ultra-paranoid about violating copyright. I imagine if you could do it at Kinko's, you'd have to all the work yourself in the Self-Service area. I doubt they have machines like that in self-service.

You *need* to be aware of OpenDJVu

[Effugas]

Run, don't walk, to http://djvu.research.att.com/home.html . DJVu is a image-based competitor to PDF that is a feat of beautiful engineering -- 300DPI scans break down to about 10-30K a page, the viewer is about an order of magnitude faster than PDF, the format cleanly supports separate encoding of page texture/graphics vs. page text, there's significant amounts of open source for it, and more.

It's truly a brilliant format. Go check it out.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com