| I just got into book scanning ~6 weeks ago. I was partly inspired by the August HN discussion of Jason Scott's rescue mission of 25k manuals [0], and intrigued by Jason's kind warning to "the next person to mention the Linear Book Scanner (a prototype that destroys books)". Emeritus community hero Daniel Reetz spent 6 years creating the "Archivist" scanner [1]. He and his collaborators have done a phenomenal job, and created some of the best documentation I've seen for any project (open-source or otherwise). The "Lessons Learned" front matter alone is inspiring [2]. So far I've found that book scanning is an ideal "DIY" project: enough hardware & software quirks that are gratifying to puzzle through, but nothing super difficult. In fact, it is exactly like building and calibrating a simple scientific instrument and learning to collect and process image data. To @planfaster or anyone who is considering book scanning for private use, definitely do it! I highly recommend buying the "Archivist" scanner kit + electronics pack available at http://tenrec.builders/. There is ample hard-earned wisdom in the forums and tenrec supplemental docs about dozens of minor process details where you think "Why don't people just do X?" and it turns out X isn't ideal, and neither is Y, but Z works fine. The main thing that I didn't consider before starting was that the scanner hardware only facilitates one very specific part of the workflow: taking pictures of flattened pages with (nearly) identical resolution and positioning. It's an important step, and reducing it to 5 seconds per page doesn't magically eliminate tedious downstream processing with other tools[3]. All that said, it's very rewarding, and really fun to start thinking about what you can do with scans, e.g. turn entire books into posters [4]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10070529 [1] http://www.wired.com/2009/12/diy-book-scanner/ [2] http://www.diybookscanner.org/archivist/?page_id=25 [3] http://scantailor.org/ [4] https://twitter.com/smd4/status/655092522071420929 |