

Digitize Your Own Books: The Book Ripper Project - anurag
http://bkrpr.org/

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Kadin
I can see how their device would be good for old or rare books, but for
anything mass market -- which seems to me would be the majority of what end-
users want to "rip" (so they can take it with them on some portable device) --
it seems like it'd be easier to de-bind and run the pages through a duplexing
scanner.

The software itself seems pretty good, what they need to do is incorporate all
the dependencies into a single monolithic installer. The external dependencies
significantly raise the bar for someone just interested in playing with the
application who might otherwise install it.

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ZeroGravitas
I think they're on the case with that:

 _"Some of our hardware designs make it easy to photograph all the pages in a
book without harming the book. Other designs allow you to remove the binding
so the pages can be dropped into a sheet-fed scanner. Whichever method you
use, the resulting images can be processed with our software to make user-
friendly files in a variety of formats."_

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jknupp
The obvious difference between this project and CD rippers (a device to which
they compare themselves many times on the site) is that the CD ripper is
basically "fire-and-forget", while this seems to be an intensely manual
process. The site quotes a scan rate of 600-1000 pages an hour, which means it
will take roughly 30 minutes of uninterrupted work to "rip" a typical novel.

Until the process is completely automated (and I don't see why it couldn't
be), it seems like too much time invested for too little payoff.

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CamperBob
That is probably the worst process I've ever seen in my life.

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jerf
Do you know of a better one for "mere mortals"?

(Please note: This is not a snarky "don't criticize if you don't have a better
solution". That's a bogus rhetorical device. This is an honest question.)

Or are you just observing that it doesn't seem very practical in general?
(Which I'd somewhat agree with.)

~~~
CamperBob
I think the first thing that comes to mind is the amount of needless
repetitive motion on the operator's part. The camera shutters should be
triggered automatically, shortly after the frame settles down on the book. You
could do the job mechanically, optically, or with an accelerometer for that
matter. If the operator didn't have to let go of the apparatus to work the
camera shutters, it would easily double the throughput.

I'd probably aim for something close to the (
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgiPaSOeP2w> ) Booksnap digitizer, but without
the glass frame to hold down the pages. Given a pair of good high-res cameras,
the page curvature can be taken out in software. Further, once you're doing
any sort of image postprocessing at all, it wouldn't be hard to sense when the
user's hands have been withdrawn after turning each page. As soon as a couple
of frames have been taken without any significant motion, the scanner can keep
those images and signal the operator to turn the page.

Google, according to [http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/03/how-googles-book-
sca.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/03/how-googles-book-sca.html) ,
apparently gets their page-curvature feedback from infrared cameras, but I
don't think most home users would need to get that fancy.

~~~
latchkeyed
Those all sound like wonderful ideas, but ones that would be very complicated
to implement. The design they show costs around $250, the price of the two
consumer grade cameras and the plexi + mounting screws. It is something a
student could put together and use in a dorm room with relative ease.

Since locked down, limited firmwares on all consumer grade cameras prevent any
kind of direct computer control, and webcams top out at a grainy 3MP with poor
optics, you'll have to greatly increase the cost as well as complexity of the
system if you want to do it all in software. The Booksnap scanner you link
uses cameras that start at 500-600. And you'd have to write the software of
course.

~~~
CamperBob
_Since locked down, limited firmwares on all consumer grade cameras prevent
any kind of direct computer control..._

(shrug) If I buy a camera without TWAIN support, that's my fault.

