DIY Book Scanner

i am xylon and i am living in madison, wi. i have built 2 libraries with a total of 5000 books. i have dumpster dived many books myself. i have been using text-a-loud to speed listen to the news and books for 10 years. i enjoy speed listen to novels while i play video games. you can see a list of books i have read by clicking on "industry producing for your defense"

my google reader blog
https://www.google.com/reader/shared/13 ... 1308691873

It's great to see so many of our community drop in and introduce themselves. If anyone of our remaining 30 or so members wants to come in and say hi, that would be really cool.

As for me, I'm headed out to go hack on LED lighting.

Since Daniel finds it so valuable for us to introduce ourselves

I am a software engineer (more than 30 years) with a lot of digital design and micro-controller experience. Or at least I was a software engineer until I started working on a M.A. in Religious Studies. My wife, daughter and I have had huge collections of books that have been sold and regathered over the years.

I have also found the need for book scanning in quest of my M.A. so that is how I happened into this community. I am collecting the parts and deciding upon the features that I want in my book scanner. I am currently in the processes of designing a handle with a built in micro-controller that should allow the user to, with one hand, lift and drop the platen and additionally zoom in/out, focus in/out, switch to auto focus or auto zoom, and snap the shot. My current estimate is that this can be built by a user for around $30-40. I will be posting details in the hardware section as soon as I have more of the design finalized.

Thanks for the introduction, jimb, and welcome!

Would you consider using Arduino as a microcontroller platform? I have similar plans (I want to control You1's script using Arduino to get the button presses exact). Arduino might feel a bit like child's play for someone with your experience, but it's an open platform that we could all easily use...

Hello all,

I stumbled across the instructable, found the link that led me here, and have been lurking for a few weeks. It's been cool to see the different approaches ya'll have taken. I like the "open-source" approach. As soon as I flesh out my own ideas a bit, I'll start building my own and share what I can. (Primarily it'll be used to digitize handwritten journals, out-of-print gov't publications, and the such.)

Thanks for sharing,

-Pez

Okay, I guess I've been lurking around long enough, and my introduction is long overdue.

My name is Edvin Eshagh, and I am a software engineer;
where the later part of my experience has focused in web arena.

After I got my black belt in martial arts in June of 2008, I realized that I have the self discipline to continue my education. Currently, I've completed one year into the three year dual MBA/MSE graduate program at California State San Jose University. I'm hoping that life pressures and challenges will not deviate me from my current academic objective.

Needless to say, I see many talented professionals contributing to the forum, and I find myself envy their knowledge.

The scanned digital version of my books provide me with search capabilities that I find extremely valuable for certain assignments. Additionally, I find value in referencing electronic library.

Though I am very happy with the current book scanner implementation, I hope to see a completely autonomous scanning solution. I have my own ideas for how to achieve such functionality; however, I do not have the engineering skills in all the appropriate areas to materialize the vision.

Hey,

Im Adam. 3rd Year Law student from Aussie.
I love books, old guitars and amps, and have been dreaming about scanning my textbooks and chucking them onto a kindle dx or plastic logic (when released).
I think it would be cool if Atiz booksnap camera control and post processing software was available for cheap because it could be used to great effect with these crazed scanning machines running directly into a computer... I am inexperienced with open source software etc so will start trying to learn more about that kinda stuff in my experiments.
Yeah awesome work to all involved in this project and everyone who offers more tips and examples of their scanners etc! Thank you everyone.

Hi,
I'm Douglas and I've been interested in scanning my books for a long time due to the sheer space they take up and the fact that I've lost a few while moving.
I've been put off it though by having to use a flatbed scanner which is why I'm so excited to read about this book scanner. Finally a way to scan my books without dying of boredom.

Hi, I'm Eriel, and I'm a readaholic!

After being told by my wife that there would be NO MORE BOOKCASES in our house, I started collecting ebooks from numerous sources.

Still, I missed many of my books, which I could not find in digital form. Therefore, my interest in book rippers!

Hi, I am Francesco From Italy.

Programmer by trade, reader and lover of literature and linguistics.

Also, AVID book scanner, surrounded by people who treat me like a nuthead, I know that this is the only place were my toys/dreams won't laughed about....

So be warned, STRONG bragging ahead...

=================

I started... ehm.. typing texts in the late '80s

Yes, typing, no scanner by then, I was working on a text database of ancient Italian poetry (from the origins to Dante)

The resulting "Duecento Archive" went online in 1993, and in 1994 it had its CGI full-text search interface written in ANSI C

It's now online since 15 years, and boy it shows its age!!!
http://www.silab.it/frox/200/ind_src.htm

Then I got my first scanner and things started to get serious.

For a few years, I scanned for my own pleasure, then around 2002 I ran into a book that I thought could be interesting: an old Italian ethymological dictionary whose copyright was expired.

I scanned it and developed some custom software to process the pages and cut each definition in separate images.

The result was http://www.etimo.it, a site with around 19.700 pages, each page devoted to a single word, containing one (or more) portions of the scanned page.
Sample page: http://www.etimo.it/?term=carta
If you browse in the entries you see that the page detection, adjustment and cutting still has serious flaws.
This was done with a flatbed scanner, I later bought a scanner with automatic feed (a Fujitsu fj 5120, one of the first ones with a reasonable price), that required cutting the book but allowed temendous scan speeds.

I started thinking big, about developing a system that would allow me to publish on-line facsimile editions of books.

First test with an old Italian biographical dictionary:
2000 pages, not fragmented in entries and only indexed by the first three letters of the name:
http://www.biografo.it/?pageurl=car

Second test with a numismatics book "Description historique des monnaies frappées sous l'Empire Romain", by Henry Cohen.
8 volumes, for a total of about 4.250 pages.
The indexing starts being a bit more complex, with a large tree of emperors, but the pages are still kept whole.
http://www.virtualcohen.com/octavius-augustus-1
The search is only done on the names of the emperors, not on the text itself.

Finally, the largest project (still uncompleted)
The Dizionario della Lingua Italiana by Niccolò Tommaseo, a huge nineteenth-century dictionary, roughly the Italian equivalent of the OED. 8 in-folio volumes, 7.300 pages cut into 120.000 definitions.
http://www.dizionario.org/d/index.php?pageurl=carta
I currently have online only the letters A-G, with 55.000 words, and when completed it should be (afaik) the largest Italian dictionary online.

Apart from this large and slow effort, I have a few smaller books that I want to scan and put online.
Some of these books are ancient and/or rare, so cutting the book is not possible, hence my interest for a DIY photography-based system, and that's why I am here.

As chance has it, I also love to take photos and I play quite a lot with CHDK, having developed some scripts like this one:
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=2877.0
and this one
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php/to ... 35342.html

So, it will take time but hopefully, thanks to all your expertise, I will have my scanning rig built and I hope I can somehow help back the project