Digitizing Old Magazines?

"I have a lot of old video game magazines, they're nice for playing 'classic games' because a lot of classics are impossible without the manual, and hard without a magazine (the magazine obviously negates the need for a manual usually). But they'd get damaged with a flatbed scanner, and digital cameras are hard to set up right for capturing old magazines. I know that old documents are digitally archived with very high-res cameras..." So, the question is, what is the best way to capture all the information in old magazines in digital format? Does anyone have a home-built rig taking after the angled-pair-of-scanners setup that Project Gutenburg uses?

Comments

Destroy the magazines

[btempleton]

Ok, you're going to hate me for saying this, because you feel they are collectors items, but really, they are just manufactured items made of bits.

So cut off the spines with an industrial paper cutter and put them through a sheetfed document scanner. Get over your attachment to paper.

If it's a special magazine that was signed by somebody or is rare, I could see keeping it. But otherwise it's a printout. The real value is in the information.

Now alas, these are probably copyrighted and can't be shared. If this were not the case this becomes a no brainer, because the "valuable" "original" would stay locked on your shelf, and the digital copy would provide value to many. It would be a strange devotion to the magazine to want to deprive so many of access to it in the name of preserving its "essence."

Scanners like the Internet Archive has are great, but they are expensive, and expensive to operate. As a result, fewer documents get scanned, and that's the tragedy, not the loss of the spine of a magazine.

Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus scanner

[Anonymous Coward]

I Use a Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus scanner.
It allows scanning a book without forcing it flat.

The scanner itself is great, but be warned, the software is infuriatingly buggy, even in the latest release. Luckily there are work-arounds.

regards ........ Zim

Re:Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus scanner

[Anonymous Coward]

This is definitely the way to do it. I've scanned roughly 20,000 pages worth of textbooks in the last one and a half years. I don't know about the software being buggy, I mean it is, but not to the point of being a hindrance. I use the core ActionExpress software to watch the buttons on the scanner and save the images to a directory. I batch tweak all those images with XnView, then combine them into a pdf with Acrobat. Once in Acrobat, I do OCR then reduce file size.

Scanning troublesome paper materials

[j_presper_eckert]

Depending on the kind of binding which holds the spine together, I normally wouldn't hesitate to use a flatbed scanner to digitize them. Stapled mags are easier to work with than ones which are perfect-bound or have saddle-stitched bindings. From my POV, the collectibility of the analog original is irrelevant; all I'm after is the data itself, regardless of the physical container. As long as I accomplish a sufficiently high-res scan, I'm happy. I've occasionally removed staples prior to scanning or even sliced off the spines with an X-Acto knife. Of course I'd be far more gentle if the originals were not my own property. :)

For magazines which are bound too tightly (or are too large or fragile) to easily fit onto a flatbed scanner, you may have to consider setting up a photgraphic copy stand. You'll need twin lighting sources on each side of the stand, angled downwards at 45 degrees. The stand should have a screw fitting to mate against the base of your camera body. Reflections from glossy magazine pages may have to be eliminated via use of a circular polarizing filter added to your camera lens. I'm not sure how you'd weigh down the edges of the mag, though...slabs of a transparent material such as lucite or plexiglass? I don't envy anyone who needs to go down this route to take digital photos of the mag pages.

Re:Wouldn't that be copyright infringement?

[palegray.net]

He's making a fair use copy.

Re:fair use?

[palegray.net]

No, no, and futhermore, no. We're not talking about the recording industry here (although they've been continuously defeated on fair use copies, along with the video industry). We're talking about making archival/personal use copies of printed works someone already owns, a practice that's been heavily tested in various academic and related arenas.

No, you could not "easily lose that fair use argument" in a courtroom with regard to this situation. Now, if you went out and distributed copies of the material, you've broken copyright law and would be wide open to civil actions.

Should you happen to continue to assert your position on this matter, cite supporting examples in case law.

Re:Same with old photographs

[hadesan]

warrior s,

My wife is in the same boat as you - she had lots of slides (~3000) from her parents, lots of 35mm negatives (too many to count), and a bunch of photos (again thousands) from all different formats.

I ended up buying her a Nikon Coolscan V ED for her to scan in the 35mm negatives she has and her parent's slides. She has been very happy with it. I already had an Epson 2450 flatbed scanner...

She scans the slides, photos, and negatives while working on other projects in her office. The easiest tool I found for the photos is Adobe Photoshop CS (a bit expensive, but worth every penny - you could download a trial version from Adobe.) You put as many photos as can fit on your flatbed scanner (no need to straighten them perfectly), scan the photos, and then click on File --> Automate --> Crop and Straighten Photos - this will break up all the scanned photos into individual files, arrange them so they are straight, after which you can then edit and save each one.

Someone else wrote some instructions at http://photoshop911.typepad.com/help/2006/01/automating_crop.html/

There are probably some scanners where you can feed photos in - but some of the photos we have are irreplaceable (no negatives or copies.) We would not want to see them lost due to a scanner feed malfunction.

Also, do yourself a favor, and make backups of the work that you do. You would hate to lose all that effort due to a hard drive failure.

Best of luck!

Re:Same with old photographs

[Milkyman]

you might try these guys,
http://www.scancafe.com/works.php
basically you mail them all your negatives (i think they take prints too) and they scan em in india, put em online and you can choose which scans to keep, then you get your originals back in the mail with a disc containing your scans.

Re:Same with old photographs

[The Second Horseman]

Minimum wage in the US (Federal) won't be $7.25 until next year. At it's inception in the early 70's, it wasn't indexed to inflation. If it had been, it'd be over $12 an hour. Some states set theirs higher than the federal and one or two are already a bit over $8. And on a "real" job, there are taxes - social security, medicare, workers comp, etc. come out of it. If you're paying someone $10 an hour, cash, they're essentially getting the equivalent of $15 or more on an over the table job. No benefits, which sucks, but if it's a part-time thing (like babysitting) someone's using to make ends meet or make a little extra money, it's not a bad deal.

Sure, paying someone under the table isn't legal, but for small stuff it happens all the time.