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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?
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.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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
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.
...this is probably the result of a "compromise" between you and your wife, because those old mags are taking up too much shelf space?
A few things:
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.
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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
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.
He's making a fair use copy.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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!
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.
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.
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!
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