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.

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).

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: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.

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.

Let me guess...

[RabidMoose]

...this is probably the result of a "compromise" between you and your wife, because those old mags are taking up too much shelf space?

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.

Don't destroy the magazines

[Simonetta]

I must respectfully disagree with the above reply. The magazine is not simply a print-out. It's an intact cultural artifact as a magazine. If not now, then in fifty or 100 years from now.

    Are you primarily interested in the text of the magazine articles themselves? Or the images (such as 'Mens magazines' like Club International that are primarily images)? Or are you interested in preserving the balance in the layout between the text, the images, and the adverts?

    For text primarily, use a stand for the magazine, and a 10 megapixel digital camera with a small tripod. Optical Character Recognition is the way to go in this situation. But it is hard to get the exact right program for your configuration.

    Are these magazines in English or a western European language? OCR is much easier and faster with 100 or so ASCII characters than it is with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. OCR for these languages exists but the programs are expensive if you actually buy them. Personally, I believe that because the Chinese have stolen billions of dollars worth of software from the Americans since the earliest days of computers, the Americans have no moral, ethical, or legal obligation to pay for any software developed and sold by a Chinese company. But, opinions differ on this issue.

    Keep the magazines intact. You'll regret cutting them up in the future when a more elegant solution to digitizing them appears that doesn't entail destroying the original materials.

Re:Don't destroy the magazines

[eclectro]

Europeans have no moral, ethical or legal obligation to pay for anything developed and sold by an American company.

Thems is invasion words.

Re:Don't destroy the magazines

[SoVeryTired]

Personally, I believe that because the Chinese have stolen billions of dollars worth of software from the Americans since the earliest days of computers, the Americans have no moral, ethical, or legal obligation to pay for any software developed and sold by a Chinese company.

Wow, just wow. I have to say that I'm saddened and a bit dissappointed to find that anyone, anywhere thinks like that anymore. If you actually gave a little more thought to that line of reasoning, you would presumably have to concede that, for example, native americans shouldn't be obliged to pay for anything, given that their land was stolen from them several hundred years ago.

It is foolish, in the extreme, to punish anyone for the mistakes their predecessors made.

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.

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: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:fair use?

[omeomi]

And people wonder why it's so easy for the RIAA to erode fair use...it's simple, when most people don't even understand what fair use is, it's easy to slowly take it away.

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.

He's trying to not damage it.

[SEWilco]

Well, yes, there are scanners with page feeders. But he's worried about damaging his originals, so he can't follow the Project Gutenberg practice of cutting off the spines and scanning the pages. If he can't use a flatbed scanner, he might have to rig up a photo stand with the magazine under lights and a stand which holds his magazine open with the pages at right angles. Unless even that would cause damage. In that case he'll have to wait for CAT scanners to get good enough to read his magazine when it's closed.

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!

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

[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.

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

Re:fair use?

[easyTree]

Why must lawyers be consulted before every action may proceed? Life is for living.

Daydreaming 50 years into the future..

*checks with lawyer*, *exhales*, *checks with lawyer*, *inhales*, *coughs*, *brain-implement logs: INFRINGEMENT DETECTED $50 fine*