My first book scanning

[bruin]

I wanted to scan books by myself for a long time...but I don't have budget to buy a scanner, although I have a mobile with 10+M-pixel camera... Last week I by chance visited this great site and knew the great free software called "Scan Tailor"...so my first e-book was born


A very simple and yet effective "hardware" setup, using a stand I already have:

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I by chance have a suitable rubber to put there, for preventing the mobile to slip:

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and that's it, rock and roll:

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Well, I use voice control to take pictures so I don't need to touch the mobile so I don't need to fix it with the stand.

I took pictures of odd pages first and then even pages. Each picture is named as IMG_yyyymmdd_hhmmss.jpg in time order, so I need to rename those to page order. I simply collect all those file names, forms as an array in javascript, and put some simple script in a browser to generate a bunch of rename command lines...simple, stupid, and effective so far.

With tiff files generated by ST, I used TIFF2PDF to convert each tiff into a single PDF, and then use pdflatex and pdfpages package (came with texlive) to combine all single-page PDFs into a e-book!

My next step is to make the PDF searchable and embedded with TOC, and I am planning to use OCRmyPDF and pdftk for these two tasks...

Btw, creating e-book is one half of my goals, the other part is to print and bind the books to fit my personal needs, because I mainly read real books, not e-books.

thank you all for the great forum/software/ideas,
/bruin

[jck57]

Great idea! Drill Press make excellent camera stand with adjustable height!

[duerig]

Can you say more about your voice control setup? I tried voice control a while back and had a difficult time with it. On my setup, it heard me say 'scan' correctly. But it also heard all kinds of noises as the word 'scan' including, in one instance, the sound if the shutter. Which led to an interesting infinite loop.

If you have had more success, I would love to know how you did it.

Thanks.

-D

[bruin]

Can you say more about your voice control setup? I tried voice control a while back and had a difficult time with it. On my setup, it heard me say 'scan' correctly. But it also heard all kinds of noises as the word 'scan' including, in one instance, the sound if the shutter. Which led to an interesting infinite loop.

If you have had more success, I would love to know how you did it.

Thanks.

-D

This is a feature of the pre-integrated "Camera" app of my mobile phone... I did not aware of such a feature until last week

The app provides two "modes" for sound-controlled shuttering:
- voice control: it recognizes two pre-defined phrases (in Chinese), so noise does not matter in this case...I am using this mode.
- sound volume threshold: when the sound volume is big enough, it will take photos. I did not try this mode...but I guess you are using this mode, so noise matters...

Probably you can have a check of you app if the voice control mode exists, or searching for an app supporting that.

Btw, for the voice control mode, a feature I would like to have is to define your own "command" (shorter) to control the shutter, then it could be possible to speak less during the operation

Thanks,
/bruin