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Ask Slashdot: State-of-the-Art In Amateur Book Scanning?
An anonymous reader writes: I have a shelf full of books and other book-like things ranging from old to very old that I would like to turn into PDFs (or other similarly portable format), and have been on a slow-burn quest for the right hardware and method to do so on a budget. These are mostly sentimental — things handed down over generations, and they include family bibles, notebooks, and photo albums, as well as some conventional — published, bound — books from the late 19th and early 20th Century. None of them are especially valuable as antiques, as far as I know; my goals in preserving them are a) to make them available to other people in my family who are into genealogy or just nostalgia, and b) so I can read some of those old, interesting books (et cetera) without endangering them any more than it takes to scan them once. I was intrigued by the (funded, but not yet available) scanner mentioned earlier this year on Slashdot; it seems to do a lot of things right, but like any crowdfunded project, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding hasn't yet arrived. It's also cheap, and that fits my household budget. What methods and hardware are you using to scan old documents? Any tips you have from a similar project, with regard to hardware, treatment of the materials being scanned, light sources, file formats, clean-up and editing tools, file-size-vs-resolution tradeoffs? In the end, I'm likely to err toward high-resolution scans, since they can be knocked down to size later if need be, but I'd be interested in hearing about what tradeoffs you've found to work for you.
One big question that I'd like to have answered: Is there stand-alone Free / Open Source software, or even just cheap software (I am mostly on Linux, by choice, but won't leap onto a sword to keep my Free Software purity) that makes for easy correction of the distortion introduced by camera-based imaging? If I could easily uncurl and keystone-correct pages, then a lot of input methods (even my phone) are suddenly much more attractive. My old Casio camera could do this 10 years ago, but I haven't found a free software desktop utility that lets me turn photos into nicely squared-up pages.
One big question that I'd like to have answered: Is there stand-alone Free / Open Source software, or even just cheap software (I am mostly on Linux, by choice, but won't leap onto a sword to keep my Free Software purity) that makes for easy correction of the distortion introduced by camera-based imaging? If I could easily uncurl and keystone-correct pages, then a lot of input methods (even my phone) are suddenly much more attractive. My old Casio camera could do this 10 years ago, but I haven't found a free software desktop utility that lets me turn photos into nicely squared-up pages.
Why is that being modded down? The copyright gods demand blood. This person is in violation.. Just read that little notice on the first or second page... "All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form..."
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you're looking for a project, what we use at my university library to scan some of the rarest and most delicate books on the planet, is definitely achievable at home. It's simply a table with interchangeable wedge shaped foam pieces, and a rack above with two cameras pointing down. Since the book is on a v cradle, the pages lay flat. You can change the angle and position of the cameras to point squarely at the pages. There's a pedal that will snap a picture with both cameras at once, so once you've got it set up, all you need to do is flip the pages and hit the pedal. You might need to readjust if the book is particularly thick, but that's all pretty intuitive once you're used to the setup.
I would suggest you look here http://www.diybookscanner.org/...
I'm planning to do much the same thing as you myself, but I've still not decided how to do it and other things have been occupying my attention recently, so I've not kept up with developments for a year or so.
There are plenty of ideas there and suggestions for software and workflows that will do what you want .
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
Sit down with transcription software and read those books aloud. Done.
I collected paperback and hard cover books for almost 5 decades. I had storage bins in the attic and garage full of them. They all went to a "friends of the library" benefit sale. About two thousand books gone freeing up space and now I have more than that amount on a hard drive and about 200 on my phone. No more dead tree books and magazines for me. I can pull up something to read any time and any place. Technology is fabulous.
Is this out of your budget? Buy one, sell it on eBay it when you're done. Anything else, you'll just be wasting huge amounts of your time.
If he wants to put it in a reader he'll need to use a book format such as epub or mobi. PDF would work as well but I think there are better choices nowadays.
Why is that being modded down? The copyright gods demand blood. This person is in violation.. Just read that little notice on the first or second page... "All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form..."
Nobody modded him down. He's from Gay Nigger Association of America. I'm not joking, or trolling, or trying to be racist, that's the actual name of the group he represents, more details about them here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
He gets down modded so much that all of his posts are -1 right out the gate.
I'm not much of a grammar Nazi, but I'm seeing this error everywhere now and I'm afraid it'll become the norm. The saying is, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating," which makes a lot more sense when you think about it.
The software piece you mentioned for turning scans into nice clean rectangles exists as "unpaper". Here's one fork: https://www.flameeyes.eu/proje...
The people who have bothered to fork and improve unpaper probably did so because they did a project similar to yours, so you might ask them about other tips and resources.
As someone else said, while pdf is convenient for READING book, it's not a particularly great format for archiving a collection of images which you may want to convert to another format later. There are several good grayscale image fomats to choose from. To order those images into a cohesive document, perhaps with separate chapters, one could produce html via a tiny Perl or shell script. That would preserve the images in their native format for later conversion as needed in the future.
Keystoning is easy to correct in Gimp. But that's going to be pretty labor intensive, and you really would want something automatic. I'd follow what others have said and buy one of the better products, like a professional scanner, and re-sell it once you're done. You can buy the ScanSnap SV600 (which everyone else seems to be recommending) for under $600 -- is that budget-friendly for you? If not, have you looked into renting such a device, or using one at a local library?
As an analogy, if you wanted to scan the old family slides, then the way to go is to buy a used Nikon pro-level slide scanner, do your stuff, and re-sell it with nearly zero loss, with the understanding that you're putting the couple of thousand dollars of purchase price at risk. I'm in the midst of doing exactly that, although given the number of slides I have to scan, I bought the scanner with the expectation that it will be a full write-off, and that's the price of not risking loss of family heirlooms by shipping the slides somewhere to have a minimum-wage flunky do the scanning.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
DjVu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Perl Programmer for hire
I was asked to look at scanning file cabinets full of legal size folders with contracts (mostly NCR forms) and hand writing on the inside covers of the file folder itself. Using a bit of lumber and a square you can make a frame to position the item to be scanned and if need be mount the webcam so it can be run up and down a mast for very thick items. Our focal plane was about 15" up for a good legal size paper image. They had an old XP box so I used IrfanView for capture and X-mouse Button Control 2 for mapping a right click to IrfanView's batch scan mode (right mouse button remapped to = ctrl+shft+a) giving sequenced file numbers to the output. They had to reset the counter for each new contract and change the destination folder, in the end we worked in the same temp folder and moved each contract before starting the next task... books would be easier in that regard. IrfanView supports a lot of plugins, but if you make a good fixture for aligning your books below the camera, keystoning should not be an issue. I don't think I would do two pages at once at 1080, but on a small book it might be OK. The main thing is lighting, even lighting makes all the difference in that rig. If I had a budget I would have set up LEDs, we just used two desk lamps. Not counting the webcam and XP box, we were way under $50. I understand why you want to do this, good luck however you go.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
We have ScanSnap scanners at work and one of the biggest pains is they do NOT support the TWAIN/ISIS driver standard. That means you cannot scan using any software except the ScanSnap software. And at ~$900 it is a little expensive for home use.
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