Hi guys,
I heard about this topic on a Tekzilla podcast and started looking into
it. Within reading for 15 minutes, I decided I had to share it.
I don't know about you, but much of my house is filled with books and
magazines on topics I'm interested in but have little time to read. I
don't want to discard them, but, at the same time, they take up lots of
space.
Imagine building your own book scanner for a few hundred dollars which
could potentially capture 1200 pages per hour of raw images. With
appropriate post processing with open source software, you could turn
your books and magazines into digital books and magazines, reclaim the
space, and potentially read them on your Kindle or tablet or smartphone,
read them with a synthesized voice, or do full text searches on the
contents. All this without destroying the book! Once I realized the
potential of this, I started getting excited. I have been considering
getting a document scanner for papers and magazines, but that requires
you to destroy the book or magazine. Many of the techniques described
in the sites that follow don't require destroying the book or magazine.
Note, because of the way a book is built, you must physically expose
each page to digitize it. There is no way around that. With a normal
flatbed scanner or copier, you have to spend about 20-30 seconds on each
page, putting it on the platen and scanning, etc. So, that's about 2
pages / minute. With the techniques described, you can do from 10-20
pages / minute even manually flipping the pages.
Note, automation, as in automatic book positioning and page turning, is
probably possible, but is probably expensive. While it may be possible
for consumer hackers to do this, it will certainly be more expensive
than manual mode.
The magic that makes this happen is the modern digital camera. They now
have enough resolution that you can take a snapshot of a page and get an
image that is still several hundred pixels / inch even at full size.
The Canon Powershot SX170 IS, for example, takes 16 MP images at 4608 x
3456 if you set it right. If you're photographing an 11" long piece of
paper in portrait mode, you're going to get about 418 pixels / inch in
the image. The aspect ratio of a piece of paper is not exactly 4:3, so
the numbers vary a bit, but you get the idea. This is plenty of
resolution for book digitizing. Of course, every page creates a 6 MB
file, so storage is a consideration. Raw images will occupy about 3 GB
per 500 pg book. But, that's a solvable problem.
Check out this site and the video on the main page:
http://www.diybookscanner.org/
Then, look here and look at this video for a really cheap alternative.
This person built a scanner (read as book holding and lighting and
photographing system) from a cardboard box, a piece of glass, a mini
tripod, a desk lamp, and a digital camera. Cost other than the camera
was probably $ 20. By appearance, it looks like he can still do about
10 pages / minute. (The video is speeded up so it's hard to tell.)
http://bookscanner.pbworks.com/w/page/40965440/FrontPage
Finally, this site has advice for more traditional scanning of magazines
by disassembling them.
http://www.retromags.com/guides
As I said, I've been studying this for 15 minutes or so, but it sounds
so cool, I had to share it. Something like this might become one of the
first hacker projects I've built in a while.
Sincerely,
Ron
--
(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such. I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)
Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com
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