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The DIY Book Scanner
azoblue writes "Daniel Reetz did not want to lug around heavy textbooks, so he built a book scanner to create digital copies. '... over three days, and for about $300, he lashed together two lights, two Canon Powershot A590 cameras, a few pieces of acrylic and some chunks of wood to create a book scanner that's fast enough to scan a 400-page book in about 20 minutes (PDF). To use it, he simply loads in a book and presses a button, then turns the page and presses the button again. Each press of the button captures two pages, and when he's done, software on Reetz's computer converts the book into a PDF file. The Reetz DIY book scanner isn't automated — you still need to stand by it to turn the pages. But it's fast and inexpensive.'"
This would be a good activity for the winter months when farming isn't possible.
Here comes the Publisher's Copyright Enforcement Gundams to give you "What For!".
Imagine that, thinking you could actually DO Something like that with your very own property.
What cheek!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Except for the lack of an automatic page-turner, Daniel's device is the same as one you can buy commercially for about $20,000 (http://www.treventus.com/bookscanner_pageturner.html).
He was wise to decide on manual page-turning.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I do this for my law school textbooks (unless you're a book publisher, in which case I am joking and would never break the law).
I was excited when I read this because it is a pain in the ass to turn the pages in a 1000 page Constitutional Law textbook. Thus, you can imagine my disappointment when I read that his machine doesn't automate this.
Most universities have at least one library which has a Ricoh scanner that does exactly what his does, i.e. it writes out a PDF onto your USB stick. I don't know where he's a graduate student, but I bet if he looked in his library he could have saved himself $300.
It may work well enough for basic textbooks, but the problem is that (for high-quality scans) you can't ever get the same image quality from a $800 camera that you can from a $80 scanner. At 1200 DPI, a scanner is equivalent to a ~384 MP camera. Even scanning at "only" 300 DPI is ~90 MP, a far bigger image than any consumer-grade camera can provide.
The cameras he used were only five megapixels.
Might work for looking at the pages on your iPhone. Not gonna look very readable on your laptop screen, and forget about reading the book's footnotes.....
~
What a coincidece! I too have a book scanner that scans books, and requires a human operator to attend to turning the pages.
It's called a scanner.
http://bkrpr.org/doku.php
Same thing, much cheaper (I built mine for ~150 USD.)
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
You must not have ever gone to college. A textbook for $15? Get real.
This is a market that relies on outrageous reproduction prices just like cd's used to. They are equally doomed. I know a LOT of college students who no longer buy books ... they rent them for free by buying them, shooting them, and returning them. It may take a couple of hours to do manually without a device like this, but $80 per hour is pretty good wages for a college student.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
from the comments with the article
posted by: irrational | 12/11/09 | 11:56 pm
I do it in 5 steps, and you get rid of the book when you’re done since you don’t need to store it. After you get done putting 200 hours into your creation, you’ll have spent thousands of dollars worth of your time. I solved this problem much more quickly years ago:
1. Buy a good sheet-fed and high-speed scanner. I have a Panasonic KV-S2026 color.
2. Get a decent jigsaw from Home Depot. Use metal cutting blades (24 teeth/inch or better)
3. Saw the spines off the book and for God’s sake use some C-clamps on each end of the book. Preferably sandwich them between two flat boards.
4. Remove and feed sheets through the scanner to OmniPage and text recognize the pages.
5. Save as PDF.
6. Repeat. You now have searchable digital books!
Ironically, all these books that he and others are trying to scan into a digital format where created in a digital format from the start, sitting on a publisher's computer somewhere.
Thanks copyright laws! Thank you very little.
One semester's worth of books in college today runs around $1000. With this device you can return the books after you've scanned them. If you rip out the binding, most bookstores are going to frown on returns.
So this device saves about $700 the first semester, and $1000/semester after that.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I'm amazed at how good OCR has gotten. I did the same thing without building anything: just connected my Canon PowerShot A540 to a tripod, lay the tripod on a coffee table, put the book on the floor, and started snapping away. Fed the JPGs to ABBYY FineReader 10, and it spit out plain text that was *at least* 97-98% accurate on every page. I did not use any special lights, do not know anything about photography, and frankly thought I'd have to buy all sorts of special equipment. The only other thing I added for convenience sake was Dirk's CanoRemote so that I would not move the camera (however imperceptibly) every time I pressed the shutter.
Actually, the motivation behind the project stem's from Dan's stay in Russia before his graduate studies. He realized that their are tons of old posters, pictures, and other soviet propoganda floating around the country's libraries that many people in the western world would like to view, but are unwilling to go to Russia to see. He wanted to digitize some of these posters (works of art, in his view) in order to circulate them on the web. He soon became very frustrated with using a flatbed scanner, and stopped. Zoom ahead a few years later, Instrucatables is having a contest to win an epilog laser cutter, so he decided to build a book scanner out of recycled (read: trash) materials and submits the project, and wins. He says he's surprised at how well the project has resonated with the web community.
He may be scanning books to pirate them. However, I am a college student as well but trying to save money by pirating the books is not my objective.
I am in my 40's and my eyesight is not what it used to be. Here is why I would buy the books and scan them.
1. To be legal and comply with the law. I may very well by the books used, to get them as cheaply as possible. But I will buy them.
2. It is much lighter for me to carry one laptop around on campus, perhaps with copies of all the books I have used for all terms up to the current term.
3. I can zoom the pages to a comfortable size to read the text.
4. I now have the ability to search through the text.
5. I can use a text-to-speech reader to listen to the book, I can even make an mp3 of the book if I so desired.
To me it sounds like a bargain
vi +
See also the BookLiberator, a somewhat more compact cube-in-cradle design, that's also easy to build. Although soon you won't have to build your own: we're prototyping a manufacturable, flat-packed kit to sell from our online store; see questioncopyright.org/bookliberator for more about the project. It should be ready next year.
None of which is to detract from Reetz's accomplishment, of course. This renaissance in personal book scanners is going to make it easier for all of them, in the long run, especially as we can share the same open source software among all the scanners.
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
Based on the last 40 years of Disney legislation?
For-fucking-ever.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.