Contact Info

This site is maintained by Jonathon Duerig and Scann. General inquiries can be sent to diybookscanner [at] gmail [dot] com and questions about book scanner kits can be sent to info [at] tenrec [dot] builders.

History

In 2009, Daniel Reetz published a tutorial on how to make a book scanner from cheap cameras and trash. His initial tutorial touched off a firestorm of interest and launched this community.

In the ensuing years, our community has explored this exciting new realm of preservation at the personal scale. Because of our efforts, book digitization is no longer the sole domain of large institutions and billion dollar companies.

In 2015, Daniel retired from the project, but the community lives on. We are still producing new designs and new software. Step by step we are making it easier for anyone around the world to produce high quality scans of the history they hold most dear.

Press

Over the years, a lot of news articles have been written about the promise and possibilities of DIY Book Scanning. Here are links to a few of them:

• New York Times: Innovation Far Removed From the Lab
• BBC: Tech heads display DIY projects at New York Maker Faire
• Wired: DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes
• Blown to Bits: Do It Yourself Book Scanning
• On the Commons: DIY Book Scanning Takes Off
• Ars Technica: How we built a DIY book scanner with speeds of 150 pages per minute Note: The speed quoted in the headline must be a typo. We usually see a top speed of 20 pages per minute.
• Makezine: The Archivist: A DIY Book Scanner
• Hackaday: DIY Book Scanner Processes 600 Pages/Hour
• Business Insider: This Book Scanner Is Changing The Infrastructure Of Reading
• Raspberry Pi Foundation: A Raspberry Pi-Controlled Book Scanner
• Hackaday: Six Years of Work and Rationale in a DIY Book Scanner Documented