Book Liberator beta

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vitorio
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Book Liberator beta

Post by vitorio »

Question Copyright has finally(!) launched their beta for their cube-shaped Book Liberator unit. Just ordered one.

Wood, fixed camera-platen distance, no lighting, you lift the whole unit out of the cradle to turn the page. Looks heavy and tiring. http://bookliberator.com

I predict glare issues.

I'll be trying it out with two 41MP Nokia 1020 camera phones.
dtic
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by dtic »

I gotta say it looks like an arm or shoulder injury waiting to happen. I wouldn't want to try lifting a wooden frame with two cameras and platen glass with one arm in that angle 200 times in a row. Screenshot from their page:
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duerig
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by duerig »

I'm very interested in seeing how both the Liberator frame and the Lumia cameras perform. Please send along some sample scans and also pictures of your Liberator and lighting setup. If I get the money at some point, I want to get a couple of those camera-phones myself.
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by daniel_reetz »

I'm glad to see the Liberator launching.

Our collective experience agrees 100% with the points raised here.
  • Lifting that frame several hundred times will be hard on the body. The acrylic alone will be 1lb 9oz.
  • The cameras and the wood-colored frame will appear in the scans (perhaps they can be processed out).
  • The whole thing is dependent on overhead room lighting, which is not uniform, and those same lights will appear in the glass. The operator can cast a shadow on the pages.
  • Likewise, side-lighting from a window or non-diffuse source will cast shadows from the arms.
  • The cameras are supported on a single threaded rod, which means that they're mounted on a pivot and can rotate about that axis.
  • The book pages will "move" in the camera images (we know this can be rectified)
A few years ago I built a similar machine and I decided not to go further with it because of these issues, especially lighting/glare/camera reflections.

It looks like Question Copyright's mission is really leading the Book Liberator charge:
We've always known that whenever people feel the effects of copyright restrictions directly, in their own lives, they inevitably start questioning those restrictions. The goal of the BookLiberator project is to enable people to encounter those restrictions more often, in more situations, so they'll ask the same questions we ask here at Question Copyright.
That is a little different than the aim that I have with this project - I want to enable people to digitize books, not to enable them to feel the restrictions of copyright. I think their mission is SUPER IMPORTANT, so I am glad to see their design getting launched, especially after it was put on hold for years due to the terrible Ion Booksaver. I feel strongly that the "competition" is good, particularly in the Open Source world (where it can really become cooperation, particularly in software and documentation space). Good luck, Question Copyright!
vitorio
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by vitorio »

Ironically, the second Nokia 1020 and the Book Liberator arrived before the Amazon order with the smartphone tripod adapters. I'm not sure I'll have time to assemble it this weekend, but it ships in a 20"×14"×6" box (the tracking notice says 10.2lbs), and the interior box is 15"×12.5"×4". The acrylic and wood are all saran-wrapped together in that bundle.
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victoriaaustralia
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by victoriaaustralia »

My bookscanner is based on their design (initially named Bookripper(Bkrpr))
http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/vie ... oria#p5382

Yes it is a bit cumbersome and lighting is a difficulty however the design is very simple, quick to make and robust. I am only scanning 6-8 books a year so it is not worth my time to build a whole new scanner currently.
Freeware Windows workflow in 2020
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3620
vitorio
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by vitorio »

Okay, so, first things first, I experienced both of the "known issues" described on their site. First one:
The rubber strips that help the base grip the table surface aren't glued strongly enough to the underside of the base. We found this in testing and have already talked to our manufacturer about it; 1.0 will not have this problem.
It's not just that the strips aren't glued strongly enough, it's that the adhesive, I dunno, melted? Got gooey and ran out all over the place? I dunno. There's gunk everywhere. There are rubber strips glued or double-faced taped to some pieces of wood, and the adhesive didn't hold, and now there's gunk on some of the sides and other pieces and the paper covering the acrylic. Yuck. All of the strips eventually fell off and I had to re-stick them on (I used permanent double-faced tape because it was handy, I expect I'll have to revisit that).
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Also, despite the big sticker inside the box, there are no instructions. There's this "making" page which kinda does a show-and-tell of the parts, but there aren't assembly directions. "Our Beta kits are easy to assemble with just a Philips-head screwdriver and some common sense" is all the wiki says. Pfft.

I started assembling the camera/platen cube first. There are twenty 2" screws, ten 1" screws, and ten 3/4" screws. This is the outside of the cube in its final diamond orientation, large holes go on the outside for the heads of the screws to sit in.
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At the top goes the wooden bar with the rounded sides, that's the handle. The left and right corners are the bars with the camera post slots.
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All the holes are pre-drilled, so I hand-screwed the 2" screws in to start them, and then did them the rest of the way with a power screwdriver. 2" screws all around.
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Then the cradle, or base, which is weird. The cradle is in two parts, left and right, with the cradle half and two vertical supports, but then one half has a single tongue, and the other half has two to make a groove. Here's one of their photos:
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The supports go rubber side down, to keep it from sliding on the table. The tongues are all different: the single tongue has screw holes on both sides. The other two only have them on one side.

Screw the single tongue into the vertical supports with 1" screws. The vertical supports have the wide hole for the screw head on the outside.
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Screw the individual tongues for the groove with 1" screws also. The vertical supports will have the wide hole for the screw head on the inside.
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Attach the cradle, wide hole out (where the book will be), slanted cut down against the tongue, to each pair of vertical supports, using the rest of your 2" screws.
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The acrylic sheets have a beveled edge; that's where they meet at the bottom of the camera cube.
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Use the 3/4" screws and the clamps to put the acrylic on.
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Then be prepared for the second "known issue:"
We also encountered an issue with the width of one plexiglass pane: it was a tiny bit wider than cube face, which caused a slight curvature of the pane. We're not sure how widespread this problem is, because most of the units are already boxed and sealed and we can't check every one of them. However, the solution we used was pretty simple: pad one of the side clamps with a small scrap of cardboard.
Both of my acrylic sheets were too wide for the cube, and putting cardboard shims in there is super annoying.
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Finally, I set the cameras up. Again, these are Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphones running Windows Phone 8.1. They have a 41MP sensor, the native ability to shoot RAW, and a 4:3 38MP mode which can see the full cradle.

Both of these are used phones from eBay, with cracked screens. A cracked screen doesn't matter, nor does a bad IMEI (someone didn't pay off AT&T). As long as the camera and digitizer (touchscreen) are intact, the cameras are usable over wifi or USB, with no SIM card or cellular subscription necessary. A screen protector will keep the cracked screen from coming apart.

Technically, they're mounted upside down in one of these ChargerCity tripod adapters, with the lens right over the mounting hole, because the cube's camera slot is right in the middle, and is only an inch wide. The official Nokia 1020 camera grip with tripod mount has the hole way off on one side. For this scanner, I feel like you really want the lens right in the middle.

Noting Daniel's comment about rotation, I bought two tiny levels that I'll stick on the phones.

You get two threaded rods and six acrylic wingnuts. I set up the cameras like this:
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At the end, I had two 1" screws and two 3/4" screws left over.

And that's it, right? That's all you wanted to know?
kfogel
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by kfogel »

Hi, Vitorio. Thanks so much for the detailed photos and narrative! It's useful for others assembling BookLiberators, and it's useful feedback for us.

Have you scanned any books yet?

I posted a reply in the forums.bookliberator.org thread at http://forums.bookliberator.com/t/beta- ... -thread/36 . One question I asked there is: Can you say by appx how much the plexi panes were too wide? Knowing the range of the problem will help as we discuss this with our manufacturer.
kfogel
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by kfogel »

@daniel_reetz:

Thanks for the supportive message! I actually haven't found lifting the cube to be a problem, even repeated hundreds of times, but that's definitely a YMMV kind of thing. Similarly with the lighting issues: good ambient light seems to do the trick. Probably BL gets some lighting artifacts, but they haven't been big problems in practice for us -- once good ambient lighting is in place, which of course is a room-wide issue and thus not always the most convenient thing to arrange.
daniel_reetz wrote: That is a little different than the aim that I have with this project - I want to enable people to digitize books, not to enable them to feel the restrictions of copyright. I think their mission is SUPER IMPORTANT, so I am glad to see their design getting launched, especially after it was put on hold for years due to the terrible Ion Booksaver. I feel strongly that the "competition" is good, particularly in the Open Source world (where it can really become cooperation, particularly in software and documentation space). Good luck, Question Copyright!
Well, we want people to be able to digitize books too -- that's also a goal. But I'm glad you support our overall mission!
vitorio
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Re: Book Liberator beta

Post by vitorio »

Can you say by appx how much the plexi panes were too wide? Knowing the range of the problem will help as we discuss this with our manufacturer.
It's a little hard to say, because there's a bit of give because the wood doesn't screw together precisely, even with the pre-cut holes:
mis01.jpg
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One of the pieces looks to be 2mm too wide:
mis02.jpg
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The other looks to be 1mm too wide:
mis03.jpg
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And here's what it looks like where they meet:
mis04.jpg
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Does that help?

I haven't tried scanning a book yet. Maybe this weekend.

I've also already scratched the platen acrylic. A screw in the cradle didn't sink all the way in (even after backing it out and trying again), and after I set the fully-assembled cube into it, I pushed the entire unit by the cube, which scraped the acrylic across the slightly-jutting-out screw head.

Here's what the glare looks like here at home, near a ceiling fan with pendant lights(?), and not at an office or workshop with diffuse overhead lighting:
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Not too bad, but as Daniel surmised, you can see the reflection of the facing wood supports. And then the other side where you can actually see the overhead light:
glare02.jpg
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Regarding the cameras, the cradle is 11.5" wide, and maybe 10.5" of height is visible in these shots. The highres image (4:3, 38MP) has around 5000px across the cradle width, and 4700px for the cradle height, or ~434dpi wide, ~447dpi tall. I was kinda hoping it'd be more. I'll have to adjust the camera mounts to get the 16:9/34MP aspect to fit, maybe that will be different.
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