Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[boelle]

hehe...

yeah and my cam was just sitting in the side of a closet and the book on a table just below...

so something cheap and simple for my 200 books... i was thinking about the cardbox cradle i have seen.. must think a bit

now i could relly use the live cd.. something i can just feed all the pics and more or less get an file in epub (might be pushing my luck)

[rdmac949]

My name is Robert and I'm a teacher. I am looking to be able to bring my textbooks with me on trips so I can plan lessons and such. I've used my school's photocopier to scan in books but its too rough on the spine of the book. I am very much looking forward to getting my scanner and getting started on digitally archiving my books.

[bobtiki]

Hey all, I'm Mark, an all-around geek with way too many books and archived magazines that he doesn't want to ever move to a new house again. I'm “bobtiki” pretty much everywhere on the web, and yes, I do enjoy the occasional tropical drink.

I'm a video editor and motion graphics artist who mostly works on non-fiction cable television, for Discovery, National Geographic, History, and the like. Have a passion for making and watching films, science fiction, Macs and iOS devices, and I'm slowly learning to program for those in Objective-C and Python.

Most of my books are non-fiction, and an awful lot of them are technical development and video post-production books that, even though they're perfect-bound, I suspect would benefit from the treatment that the new standard scanner might give them (since most of them are thick enough to lay open). I also have a ton of small sci-fi paperbacks that I'm considering guillotining and feeding through a Scansnap.

I also own the entire run of Cinefex magazine (writing about movie special effects since 1980) that I'd like to have in portable, searchable form, so I may be spending a bit more time and attention getting those OCR’d perfectly and cleaned up.

I'll be reading most of them on an iPad, probably in PDF form, because the formatting of the technical books seems like it would be maddening to OCR and try to re-flow.

Looking forward to starting this build, as soon as I research my eyeballs out on the forums here.

Cheers,
MB

[Gothiczartan84]

Hello, Daniel. allow me to introduce myself. My name is Michael Olmsted and I am the man with many hobbies like book scanners that you created. I also like to collect books of my own, I'm not just collector, a huge fan of gi joe, likes to collect 3.75" star wars action figures and I do have books about star wars. I really need to have a book scanner like the one you made because I got lots of books of gi joe and star wars that I wanted to scan that include comic books if that would work out on the book scanner DIY. I live in a small house, I'm a toy collector also. I really love the idea of the DIY book scanner since I had seen some clips on youtube. first I had seen a book scanner by opticbook series but they cost too much. I will choose the DIY book scanner instead the other book scanners like opticbook.

[Pierrotcom]

Hello everybody!
My name is Pierre, and I'm from Paris.
I'm looking for some help for the numerization of one hundred books of archive (the Newspaper I'm working for), format A2, 500-600 pages each books.
So if somebody from paris has a DIY book scanner, or is willing to help us building one, it would be wonderfull.
I stay avalaible for any information,

Thanks

[charlesturner]

My name is Charles Turner. I am a lawyer. While I do a bunch of different things as a lawyer, what I am doing right now is quieting title to an old gold mine in Central Alabama. This involves converting thousands of pages of old hand written real estate documents into 1 and 0's.
The scarcity of photocopiers in the nineteenth century meant that most documents were copied, by hand, into enormous old, leather bound books that look like Dumbledore's cookbook. The existing method for obtaining scans is to place the book, face down, on a big photocopier and reduce the pages down to legal size. As you might imagine, this is hard on the old books and the resulting images are hard on the eyes. The recorder's office also charges like a dollar a page for these crappy copies.
I need the ability to open a book, get good quality images of both pages and turn the page. At this point, we aren't scanning whole books, just miscellaneous documents. The scanned documents are transcribed and will eventually be entered into a custom database called a title plant. We have to have archival quality scans of a standard size. I think OCR is completely out of the question. 105% accuracy is a mandate.
The length and width of the volumes is expansive, probably 18"w x 30"l. We also have some old work papers that served as a 19th century database. They are super wide, like 36".
I am delighted to have discovered this site. I appreciate the hard work that has gone into it and hope that I can contribute as much as it looks like I am going to benefit.

[caramel]

Hi
I'm a french student, I'm happy to find your community because I love books and I would like to digitize all my books, to be able to bring them anywhere easyly.

So next month I'm planning to build a scanner from scratch and different with yours, because it will be a fully automatic scanner , wich will be able to scan any books, included paperbacks because I have never seen any book scanner that works with paperback, and I want my scanner to be cheap and working at a speed of 1 page each 5 seconds.

I will let you know how to build the same for you

[Librum]

Thank you for letting me access.

I am Sarah, the senior research librarian of the Librum. Librum, translated, is 'scales', or 'place where scales are kept', so a Librum is a community center, which usually includes a 'Librium' (library)(note the ' i ' ). Our old order Mennonite enclave is part of a network of specialized correspondence schools for various correspondence courses geared direct to old trades. Ours is geared to the various paper trades, book restoration, etc, so we have the largest Librium, so we are called 'THE Librum', or 'the School Librum'. We also act as the clearing house for networking purposes of the other schools.

Some of the courses include book restoration, to include digitization, but gearing towards the 'lowest tech'. Most other enclaves do not have electricity, enough said? In other words, we teach it, if it is 'old school'. Sewing, sheafing, leather tooling, printing by press, block, electro, etc, basically everything one can think of concerning books prior to the day of 'perfect binding' and we teach that too.

Some students, for their final certificate, must travel here for their final project. Many of these are put online for others to enjoy at http://www.librum.us, and the ICS Project is at http://www.icsarchive.org. We have quite a bit of older equipment, for student familiarization purposes. These range from 'light tables', to projector cameras, to 'fiber optic beds', to drafting sheet scanners and printers, to '100 cradles' (like yours, name comes from '100 degree', the angle of the cradle), photographic tripod, dark rooms and related, microfiche readers and scanners, microfilm readers and scanners, etc.

In addition to our standard students, we also host specialized restoration classes, upon demand, to various preservation groups, particularly the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress. In other words, copyright spoken very strongly here. I did get a chuckle at a moderators post of 'insert standard rant about perpetual copyrights'. I/we have to deal with that on a daily basis, and it is a pain, especially finding out what are, and are not. But I am not an international rights attorney, and operate under international library copyright laws, very different, so please do not ask me such questions. I can field them from a registered library perspective, but not from a private person, or printer/publishers perspectives.


I was invited to come here. And I hope I can help some folks, and I promised to be civil.

Sarah

[sam_brewer]

Greetings to the Forum!

I'm an EE working on modern-technology stuff during the day and retro vacuum-tube-stuff during my "off-peak" hours. Many old books exist on vacuum-tube technology, mouldering and largely forgotten in hardwall libraries, but virtually none of them have been digitized and made available in e-readable format.

While I can access many of these books in hardcopy, the loaners would be nice to keep in my library. I have a very-good flatbed scanner, but am quite familiar with the less-than-useable product flatbeds produce when copying books... But how to make copies of rare books that I'd like to hang onto for my own library without cutting them up to sheet-feed into a flatbed (which the library would take a _very_ dim view of such activity)

Fortunately, Ixquick popped this site up near the top of the searchlist, I was inspired to repurpose parts of an old cheapie-scanner that was waiting for a trip down to the recycler, and 1036 pages (and one weekend) later I have digitized my first book!

Oh, JOY - another obsession to squeeze into the all-too-short 24-hour day!

Sam

[jaske78]

Hullo, I am Jason, from the Charlotte, NC area.

I am an academic historian and I have thousands of books - five bookshelves in one room alone, all double-stacked.

I have scanned some of the things that are rare and out of print for my personal use, as there have been sometimes where I have needed to have access to some of the books that I couldn't pack with me.

So far I have scanned and processed about 400 books using a flatbed HP G4010 scanner and Scan Tailor, which is about as tedious as it sounds. And yes, some of these were library books, but only the rare and out-of-print ones that I need to build a solid argument, I promise! (Coolest "find" so far: a 1940 copy of a propaganda book put out by the German Ministry of Information, published in New York, blaming Polish extremism against ethnic Germans in Poland for the invasion of Poland. Reading it I was struck by the similarities between that and Putin's language about Crimea.)

So far, I am looking forward to getting better. At the moment, I am packing up to go to Eastern Europe for three months. That should give me enough time to make decisions on what kind of book scanner I can create for a more efficient experience.

As I look at this, I am struck by how much I don't know. Some of the posts are old enough that I wonder if they are outdated. Some of them are so technical that my eyes cross. The fact that many posts are a year or more old also puzzles me. Is it just a slow, low-key board or has interest waned due to technical innovations I am unaware of?

I wish everyone a pleasant summer.