
How to Make a Full Auto Book Scanner - llambda
http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html
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WalterBright
I've been scanning my (several thousand books) for over a year now. Using a
flatbed scanner is completely impractical at 1 minute per page. I:

1\. Use a stack slicer to cut the spine off 2\. Feed it through a sheet
feeding scanner 3\. Check results 4\. Do any necessary rescans and stitch the
result together with pdftk 5\. Chuck the (now destroyed) book into the
recycling bin

I have around 60Gb of books now, and have emptied many, many shelves and
boxes. It's nice that I can now put my entire library onto my laptop.

It doesn't take that long per book, maybe 5 minutes. The main time-wasters are
when a book has damaged pages so the hopper feeder doesn't work right on it,
or when the bookbinding glue has spread too far and pages are stuck together
beyond where the spine cut was made.

The hopper scanner will scan both sides at once in a couple seconds.

I run the scanner at 400dpi, which is far better than any of the current
ereaders will display them. But I figure it's future proofing them. My current
ereader of choice is the Kobo Aura that has the retina e-ink display. It's
well suited to reading scanned books because:

1\. the retina display eliminates the jaggies 2\. the glow screen works well
in low light conditions 3\. the larger screen size is suited to scanned book
pages 4\. the 32Gb microsd slot enables me to carry around at least half of my
library :-)

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shocks
> 1\. Use a stack slicer to cut the spine off

Ouch. This really seems like a shame. I imagine you're not destroying any
books of 'value', but still... Something about willingly destroying thousands
of books... :/

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new299
I did the same thing, it is depressing, but even more so that it's often the
only way to get a decent digital copy of a book:

[http://41j.com/blog/2012/02/how-to-get-a-digital-copy-of-
the...](http://41j.com/blog/2012/02/how-to-get-a-digital-copy-of-the-art-of-
computer-programming/)

~~~
WalterBright
One of the books was self-published, so I wrote the author and offered to
"kindle-ize" it and we'd split the proceeds. He agreed, and we've both made a
tiny profit.

Only 2 or 3% of my books are available in digital format.

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stfu
I just love having all my books searchable, I use <http://1dollarscan.com/>
quite regularly for this purpose. It keeps these things really simple, esp.
because it still takes me with regular book scanners (the non fully-automated
ones) about half an hour scanning a 300 page book.

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KeithMajhor
I'd never heard of them before. I wonder if they keep the old scans and resell
duplicate books. They could make a bunch of extra money on half.com or
similar. Depending on how they're scanning the books it'd also save time. Then
again, it could be that they're required to destroy the scanned book in order
for it to be legal.

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breathesalt
Having run a textbook scanning service (<http://www.ptrfy.com/>) for a while
now, I can say assuredly that keeping master digital copies or the physical
processed books is a substantial legal liability.

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sdmn
Would it be possible to avoid the problem by storing scanned books in an
encrypted form where the key is some words from random page?

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miles
For fully automated, non-destructive scanning of rare books and the like,
check out the APT BookScan 2400: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjm6dBNlPug>

These guys (no affiliation) offer scanning services using the 2400:
[http://www.merrittgraphics.com/services/scanning/bookscan.ph...](http://www.merrittgraphics.com/services/scanning/bookscan.php)

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clebio
That's awesome, how much ... wait, 'call us... download our credit
application'?? Ouch, must be pricey.

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hdevalence
According to some documents I found with Google, one of those machines costs
something like 100,000-120,000€.

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italophil
Ha, who knew. Geocities lives on in Japan.

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michaelmior
That was the first thing I noticed about this post! :)

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pasbesoin
Partially OT: For people using Canon compact cameras together with the CHDK
firmware in DIY imagers/scanners, which models are preferred these days? My
A640 was stolen and I've been wondering what to replace it with.

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markvdb
Hi! You want to look at the Canon PowerShot A810.

That is what we currently ship our kits with at <http://diybookscanner.eu> .

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GICodeWarrior
This scanner design from last year is pretty neat too.
<https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/>

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6d0debc071
Talking of scanning machines, this is pretty cool:

<http://youtu.be/W1-2DmDmZgI>

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parkov
Spooky, by pure coincidence that video uses the same book (different edition)
for their demo that my blog post does for 1DollarScan:

[http://thomaspark.me/2012/12/digitizing-books-on-the-
cheap-a...](http://thomaspark.me/2012/12/digitizing-books-on-the-cheap-and-
easy/)

