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

Wouldn't that be copyright infringement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just asking...

Re:Wouldn't that be copyright infringement?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing Sections 107 (Fair Use) and 108 (Concerning the Rights of Libraries and Archives) of the U.S. Copyright Code. The right of an individual to make an "archival copy" of copyrighted material is a very broad interpretation of Fair Use - which covers reproduction chiefly for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Preservation copies are protected by Section 108, but only for libraries and archives. The courts have yet to decisively rule on a case involving the extension of Fair Use to cover something like an individual's right to digitize an old magazine collection.

Same with old photographs

[warrior_s]

I have the same question but for my old photographs. We have a lot of old (non digital) pictures when I was a kid (when there were no digital cameras). And it would really help if someone have some good suggestions on converting those to digital formats.
I am scanning few of them from time to time, but there are way too much to manually scan each one of them. TIA

Re:Same with old photographs

[Simonetta]

I suggest paying someone $5-$10 US an hour to scan the photos on a 300DPI flatbed scanner. Try an ad on CraigsList for your area. There are a lot of unemployed people with tech skills and no unemployment checks coming in that would appreciate a job like this for a day or two. How many photos would need to be scanned? Several dozen? Several hundred? Several thousand?

    Usually adjusting the brightness, contrast, and gamma setting on black/white scan makes the image look good. I recently scanned all the images of my high school yearbook, put it on the web, and received thank yous from former classmates that I hadn't heard from in forty years.

Re:Same with old photographs

[Ilgaz]

There are scanners which got feeder unit or there are some pro companies who can do such a thing with a price.

Software is important for such a project. For such a job, I recommend Hamrick's Vuescan, it has executables for Windows, OS X and Linux. Thing is, it will make things automatically.

http://hamrick.com/

As I am perfectly happy with my el-cheapo Canoscan Lide 25 (upgraded from Lide 20 which had some accident), I went to Canon USA site to recommend such a scanner but it seems they have some mad invention there which they really failed to advertise.

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=122&modelid=9888

It installs to a Canon printer (which looks cheap) like a inkjet ink and printer becomes auto feed scanner. As I assume you got a scanner already, that solution could be a better thing. I am not sure about the quality though. I also don't know if Hamrick Vuescan or even Sane would ever support such a thing too. It is really worth looking into, perhaps see some demo or review from a trustable source.

Other solution is Xerox or HP multiple document scanners (with feeder). I would go with Xerox, I keep reading about HP driver horror stories.

Re:Same with old photographs

[HughsOnFirst]

I recently rephotographed over six and a half thousand Polaroid photographs, google jamie livingston photo of the day if you are interested in the details, and scanning that many photographs on a flatbed scanner is crazy. Using a DSLR on a copystand I spent about 3 or 4 seconds per photo. Using a flatbed I could never get down to much less than a minute per photo, and a machine fed scanner was out of the question for 30 year old Polaroids. This was in 2004 , maybe scanners are faster now , but I doubt it.

Post processing is about the same for both , photoshop scripts to crop , straighten , remove dust and scratches , and open up the shadows could run in batch mode. I also wrote a batch that assembled them into 61 files to be printed out and assembled into a 8 foot by 120 foot display.

I also put the assembled version up on gigapan.org Search for it on for it on gigapan, it's interesting how different it looks assembled.

Re:Same with old photographs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That assumes that the person you are paying is engaging in income tax fraud. It's like hiring someone for less than minimum wage because they are a felon, a child, an illegal immigrant, an alcoholic, or some other class that can't easily find minimum wage work. There are good reasons not to do that, and personally I'd rather pay someone $20/hour not to have to deal with those reasons.

A mirror?

[jadedoto]

The best thing I can come up with off the top of my head is get a light controlled room, and place a thin mirror (clean mirror, very clean mirror) in the pages... and photograph the image on the mirror when you get it at the right angle... Maybe.

Classic Comics too

[managerialslime]

I have a collection of hundreds of comic books from the early 1900's. (So all of their copyrights have expired.) I'd scan and share them with the world but find scanning with my 30+ second per page flat bed scanner (in hi res) to be a time consuming.

No, I will NOT slice the spines.

The idea of 2-part solution where my digital camera is mounted and a separate stand that holds the comic perfectly is appealing. The solution would have to enable rapid turning of pages and the pages will have to remain as flat as possible.

A non-glare glass plate that does not reduce picture quality is probably too much of a dream, but I'm open for suggestions.

Give me some ideas and I may donate the images to Guttenberg or other worthwhile repository.

ambient light, tripod, shutter release remote

[maiki]

I'm not a professional magazine photographer (as in, photographer of magazines), but these tips might help. Whenever I photograph a document or painting, I just use my plain ol' digital camera.
A few things:

1. Do not use flash or direct light. Shiny magazine pages will reflect much of the light and create a glare. Use soft, ambient light (bounce it off a white sheet or something)
2. Stabilize the camera. Use a tripod or a stack of books. Don't hold it in your hands
3. Use a shutter release remote. If you don't have one, use the camera's timer feature (so you don't shake the camera by pushing the button)
4. Use macro-mode, and set your aperture as low as it will go. This will help you focus on something close up.
5. Use a low ISO. You'll might need a longer exposure time, but it will cut down on graininess.
6. Maybe this is obvious, but use something to hold the magazine in the right spot (keep the pages as flat as possible to avoid "warping" in the picture)
7. Try to keep the same distance for each shot, so the digital images are roughly the same scale. Also don't worry about seeing the background around the magazine, you can crop it later (better than zooming too close and missing the page number or something)

Re:ambient light, tripod, shutter release remote

[m85476585]

Most people don't have an autofeed scanner, but many people do have a digital camera. A flatbed scanner would work, but it takes a long time. I needed to make a copy of a section of a reference book, and instead of spending hours lining it up on my scanner pressing scan, waiting for it to finish, etc., I set up my 5mp digital camera on a tripod with a light angled so that it wouldn't reflect off the pages. In 20 minutes--10 minutes of setup and 10 minutes of taking pictures--I got a hundred pages digitized and readable. A higher resolution camera and flatter light would have helpt, but the results I got were acceptable.

Re:Destroy the magazines

[ksd1337]

Right now it may not be valuable enough to preserve. But give it 10 or 20 years, and you'll be glad you kept them intact. (read: eBay).

Acutally in the digital age

[Orion Blastar]

magazine and comic book companies are creating digital versions of the old magazines and comic books.

This might prove to be a business opportunity for a savvy geek that finds out what underwriting company owns the rights to defunct magazines like the Compute! series, and then buy the rights to them to reproduce them digitally. Usually some accountants and/or lawyers play the role of a corporate undertaker and buy out IP of failed companies. Then just scan the old magazines into PDF format, and sell them online for like $3 a copy to download the PDF version.

Some companies did that for the old 8 bit computers and game consoles, and made things like the Atari Flashback console or the Commodore 64 joystick by buying the IP rights to the games and the computer/console BIOS so an emulator can run inside of a tiny computer that fits inside of a game system or game controller hooked up to a modern TV set. Some companies also sell the ROMs online by buying out the IP for Atari arcade ROMs and other things.

Maybe try this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe try one of these? Never used one myself but I do find them mildly interesting for my comic collection.

http://www.plustek.com/product/book3600.asp

Re:fair use?

[jbengt]

Don't bet on it.
Seriously, you could easily lose that fair use argument in a courtroom (YMMV, IANAL, etc.), assuming that you did anything that brought attention to the fact that you made those copies.

How I do it...

[Ankh]

I run fromoldbooks.org, a Web site devoted to scanned pictures and text from old books -- some more than 500 years old.

I use an Epson Expression 1000XL flatbed scanner (A3+ resolution, approx 12x17.5" with colour calibration), Linux xsane and gimp, for most of the images, but this does involve damaging the binding of thicker books. I scan wood engravings usually at 2400dpi, but modern screened pictures at only 1200dpi or sometimes even lower. The idea that you only need to scan at twice your print resolution assumes (1) you know what printer you'll use 10 years from now, (2) that once you scale down by more than 50% there's no visible difference (false). For colour you will need to do some descreening, which will generally involve something like an 11 to 17 pixel radius gaussian blur followed by a sharpen.

I also use a Canon 450D (Digital Rebel) camera on a tripod, with a 50mm f/1.8 lens (you can get the lens for around $75 to $100 in US or Canada, less if used) and a remote control; use the mirror lockup function of the camera and the remote to minimise camera shake. I point the camera at the open book.

In either case if there are significant amounts of text I then use Abby FineReader OCR; the open source OCR programs (and most of the other commercial programs) are a waste of time by comparison, or at least that was true 2 years ago when I was last researching this.

Go and buy a couple of large USB external disk drives, e.g. 500GBytes or more, and also write DVD backups frequently. Use a consistent naming scheme; I use a separate directory (folder) for each book or magazine, and I include the page number in the filename, together with -raw for the origial scan and -cleaned for the processed version. I use PNG to save the files because it's lossless, an open standard, and widely supported; I'd suggest avoiding GIF (not enough colours), TIFF (portability problems) or JPEG (lossy).

Obviously if you want to put the magazines on the Web you'll need permission; in my case I am usually digitising out-of-copyright books, although copyright laws have changed since I started, and also my understanding of copyright has changed. E.g I started out believing Wkipedia :-)

It can be a big project, but a lot of fun!

Your Sinclair Rock And Roll Years

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello :)

My name is Nick Humphries, and I'm the owner of the Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years. Although I'm posting as an AC, you can verify it's me by sending me an email via the website.

I agree with everyone saying "keep the magazines" - there's something about having the physical mags as a tangible connection to your childhood/the 80s/delete-as-applicable. The smell, the feel...

Anyway...

All I used was an ancient UMAX 610P flatbed scanner. No spines to worry about as all issues of YS are stapled together.

Although I'm a Linux user, the graphics and OCR packages on Windows are far superior for this sort of thing. I find GIMP and Tesseract unusable (I'm one of those people who never read manuals), so I have a virtual Win98se VMWare session running for when I do my OCR-ing.

Software-wise: Paintshop Pro 8 for scanning and image processing so that the page is rotated to be absolutely vertical and the colours reduced to 2-colour b&w TIF for... (PSP's colour manipulation and free-rotation algorithms far out-class those available on the GIMP) ...PageGenie 98, an OCR package so old that the b&w OCR-ing is given away free as a loss-leader for the more valuable colour OCR-ing.

I then use OpenOffice on Linux to proof-read the text before saving the text-file ready for importing into my site-generation scripts (written in lots of Perl).

As for the legalities...

It's murkey. Future Publishing own the rights to Your Sinclair as a whole, although they bought YS from Dennis Publishing in 1990, so there's a little bit of complication added there.

HOWEVER... in a lot of cases, the publisher at the time only had first-publishing rights to an author's articles. Once printed, the copyright remained with the authors to do as they please.

That isn't true across the board - for any given article, the publisher might have owned all the copyrights, some were shared, some were just first-publishing rights, and in some cases there's a dispute as to which article falls into which category.

When I first started putting up original YS articles in 1998, I got no *official* response to my queries to Future about permissions. I decided that the Right Thing To Do would be to instead contact the original authors and get their blessings. One of them turned me down (so his articles don't appear on my site), but well over 40 others said it was OK.

Now 95% of the articles on my site have been cleared by the original authors, and I'm still trying to track down the remainging 5% - although at this stage all I'm left with is a list of pseudonyms which I don't think I'll ever track down.

So, YMMV, but that's what I did.

Nick