WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

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glenleslie
Posts: 30
Joined: 13 Aug 2012, 09:08
E-book readers owned: Kindle - multiple platforms
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

Post by glenleslie »

I have a collection of books which I want to scan en masse with a DIY Scanner.

Would love to rent (or buy) a DIY scanner if someone has one assembled (any generation).

Please PM.
glenleslie
Posts: 30
Joined: 13 Aug 2012, 09:08
E-book readers owned: Kindle - multiple platforms
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

Re: WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

Post by glenleslie »

bumping this from a couple of years ago.
BillGill
Posts: 139
Joined: 18 Dec 2016, 17:13
E-book readers owned: Calibre, FBReader
Number of books owned: 7000
Country: USA

Re: WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

Post by BillGill »

I don't think renting would be a good option for you. If you have 1000 books to scan it is going to take a significant amount of time to get them all scanned. I have been scanning books for myself for several years and so far I have scanned about 73 books. It takes me about 15 to 20 hours to complete one book, sometimes more. That is the actual working time. Starting with the scan, OCR, editing, epub creation and final wrap up. Total time generally runs from a week and a half to 2 weeks. The long pole in that sequence is the editing. After the OCR there will be many errors in the text. It will require multiple passes through the book in a text editor to correct all of them.

I am scanning the books to create digital editions that I can read on an ereader. If your goal is different you might be able to cut that time somewhat.

Good luck on your path.

Bill
glenleslie
Posts: 30
Joined: 13 Aug 2012, 09:08
E-book readers owned: Kindle - multiple platforms
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

Re: WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

Post by glenleslie »

Thanks Bill.

I started to wonder about some of the topics you raise after experimenting with my Brother MFC printer/copier. It can do B&W scans up to 300dpi. I have Finereader Pro 12 which does a great job in some respects but is utterly frustrating in others. It does a great job at page recognition, auto splitting two-page scans, auto-rotating the split pages and the OCR on higher res scans is very good.

The downsides are numerous:
  • I made a template to fit over the scanning area which fits a number of my books (to help reduce light seepage and black borders around every scan) but no matter how precise one tries to be in the scanning process with this method, you invariably mess up the alignment of the book as you go along and this means you cannot really mass edit to crop out the edges of the page.
  • This is where a major oversight lies in Abbyy's software: it does a fantastic job recognizing the text regions on the page, but offers no ability to "crop to recognized text" -- in other words all the black borders and light seepage on the flatbed scans are very difficult to eliminate en masse given the software. It will allow cropping of a fixed region-- even and odd pages as well but first bullet negates a lot of that.
  • Even at max res scans the fidelity of the page is nothing like camera-scanned pages (thus the whole idea of DIYbookscanner).
All this to say that it gave me a foretaste of what it's going to be like trying to scan many books. I didn't realize it would be on the order of many hours per book as you've indicated but I can see myself falling into that slippery slope of "just one more tweek" so the book looks good in an e-reader.

Gave me a chuckle (at myself!) to read what you wrote because I've been following Daniel's efforts since near the beginning but could never pull it together to buy all the stuff and assemble even his first dumpster-dive model but all along I've been renting a storage shed of which is about 90% stacks and stacks of boxes of books which we've kept in there for upwards of 10 years now. I was thinking that I would scan these for posterity's sake. What I've come to realize is that if I just wrote down the 10 or 20% of the books I really wanted out of this collection, bought the ebook versions (even at full retail), I'd be money ahead now that I've paid for that shed for years. From your experience it sounds like the time investment is just not worth it except for a very few books in the "my Precious" category? I already have over a 1000 ebooks just in Kindle of which I've probably only read 25% ... if one does reach book scan Nirvana of digitizing one's entire collection, who would then have time to read it all? Not to mention the other problem I've noticed over the years with PDF documents... the issues of indexing, cataloguing and search are not trivial over time. All it will take is for adobe to go the way of the dinosaur and ... then when what about all the PDF docs ( + 20 years ). I think of all the Palm Pilot notes and apps and even a few books on that platform which eventually got abandoned or forgotten. Even bigger fail if Bezos hoses up Amazon and that whole organization goes down the tubes. No doom and gloom... just that I work in tech and there are no "too big to fail" corps -- formats come and go following the fortunes of those businesses.
glenleslie
Posts: 30
Joined: 13 Aug 2012, 09:08
E-book readers owned: Kindle - multiple platforms
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

Re: WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

Post by glenleslie »

I mean, after all, per the marketing... DIYBookScanner neophytes can scan 400 pages/hour and the experienced can scan 1000 pages per hour .... ;) ;) ;) ;)
BillGill
Posts: 139
Joined: 18 Dec 2016, 17:13
E-book readers owned: Calibre, FBReader
Number of books owned: 7000
Country: USA

Re: WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

Post by BillGill »

It is a lot easier to buy ebooks than it is to scan them. I do that for books I can buy. But I have a lot of books that are not available as ebooks. If I check on line and can't find them I go ahead and scan them, realizing that if they do become available I am honor bound to buy the ebook. I have had that happen a couple of times. I do not hand the digital versions around, that would be a definite copyright infringement.

I mostly am digitizing these books because I am of an age that I might have to go into some kind of assisted living, and I wouldn't be able to take my print library with me. So I am trying to replicate the parts of my library I want to keep as digital versions.

There are some good authors out there who have not been digitized. A lot of times this a matter of not being able to establish who the copyright owner is, or having established it, having to get approval from a large group of descendants who may make a few cents a year out of it.

And there I go burbling again.

Bill
glenleslie
Posts: 30
Joined: 13 Aug 2012, 09:08
E-book readers owned: Kindle - multiple platforms
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

Re: WTB or Rent DIY Scanner in Southern US

Post by glenleslie »

and a fine burble it was.

Appreciate your responses.

GL
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