Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[Fab52]

Hi,
I'am new to this board, English is a second language for me, no problem to read it, but writing as you will notice with time his an another story... I'm living north of the US eastern coast in the province of Quebec as you probably don't know this is the french part of the Canada... In fact we are few millions of french speaking people in Quebec out of about 7 millions in the province, our institution are french our prime minister is french " Jean Charest" if I translate is name in English it will give you something like "John Buggy" or "Johnny the Buggy".

Ok enough for politic and demography, my interest in a book scanner, start when I visit MC Gill University departement of digitalization in the McLeeman Library... G'wiz they have a Krista or Kirsta book scanner you should see that working... completly amazing... Vacuum for page turning and a mist of air blowing to make sure there is just one page ..... Do a search on google you'll see....

I want to built one of the DIY scanner proposed by this site because I'm involve in a group call Heritage Stanbridgeois and we have rescue a load of book from arson in one of our older house in the area. Most have been damaged by fire and water from the fire in 2010.

The smallest one is a purse booklet ( about 3" by 2") with different square dance and Waltz written in it, an date back from 1867... We have numerous catalogues and books on machinery like the "Lighting line" from J.A.Fay & Egan co. USA , 1916, or "the Official Guide of the Railways of the United Stades, Porto Rico, Canada, Mexico and Cuba... and many others...

So I'm a serious builder, involved in old building restoration since 1978, now it's time to save our old book and hand written diary more than ever, before we lost it...

See you

Fab52

[wolverinenw]

Hello All!

My name is Chris, and I'm from the rainy (yet green) Pacific Northwest. My background is in electronics manufacturing (specifically work in the photonics realm, and experience with vacuum coating tech) and generally love to tinker with all things electro-mechanical. I'm amazed at all the great ideas members of the forum have posted and am looking forward to starting my own scanner build soon.

Regards,
wolverinenw

[mmadras]

Hi. I'm Mark Madras. Live in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I'm a programmer by profession and a woodworker as a hobby. I'm also on the Board of Directors for my school alumni association and am looking for a way to digitize the yearbooks. I have around 80 of them to do and it looks like it's going to cost a pretty penny to pay to have someone scan them for me, so I thought I would give it a shot at making a scanner myself.

[Tatoosh]

Hello, I'm a retired worker bee living in the Philippines with a love of history. My wife is working on her masters in special education here as well. Currently we have a Kindle (current as of 2011) which has a few eBooks I bought from Amazon. I plan to buy a second Kindle and I want to convert hard cover reference books for my wife (such as the DSM IV TR) into a searchable eBook with working links for contents and index sections. The majority of her books are primarily text, so I want to convert to a flowable (scale to view) text format for the Kindle. My books are mixed with some being primarily textual and others with high graphic content. The textual ones are my primary concern.

Since we will be moving between the Philippines and the USA, then back to the Philippines over the next few years, I do not want to pay for the shipping of our library across the Pacific multiple times. Thus the need for an eBook format that is portable. I am amazed at the DIY scanner setups here, but they are beyond my current means of assembly. I am looking at buying a standard commercial scanner such as the Plustek Optibook 3800 which can scan to within 2mm of the edge of a bound page. It comes with ABBYY finereader 9 OCR software, but I may update to the current release if there is a serious benefit. I am particularly concerned with readable text and being able to manipulate the resulting book, creating internal links within the finished file. I have used Calibre, which is nice, but does not seem to allow me to manipulate the structure of the files created.

I am looking for any pointers or links that show how to modify scanned books so that I can make the information accessible from an eReader such as the Kindle or when viewing via a laptop.

[dR_wH0]

Hello Guys!

My name is Chronis and I'm from Greece. Hopefully I'll be able to build my own DYI scanner with your help! I intend to use it , to scan and convert to pdf paperback magazines (Related around PC's/Home Micros/Gaming Consoles), that were in circulation during the 80s and the 90's. Up until now, I've been using the classic flatbed scanner, which is proving to be very NON-friendly towards the state of the magazines.

Well, thats all for now I guess!

Cheers,

[Royal_Scan]

Hi, my name is Mike. I'm a book scanner by profession. Currently I use kodak i610's for unbound smaller documents, a KIP wide format scanner for larger, and Bookeye3 for bound books A2 size. I wanted to build my own bound book scanner and decided to go with t-slot aluminum for the frame due to its versatility. I am getting close to finishing my design and about to order my parts. Its looking to be right at $1000 for the frame which is abit costly but worth it. I had tried to work with a metal fab company and they wanted $3000 to build the same thing with steel. My biggest concern will be software to convert the images in a timely fashion.

[Gado]

Hi, my name is Mike. I'm a book scanner by profession. Currently I use kodak i610's for unbound smaller documents, a KIP wide format scanner for larger, and Bookeye3 for bound books A2 size. I wanted to build my own bound book scanner and decided to go with t-slot aluminum for the frame due to its versatility. I am getting close to finishing my design and about to order my parts. Its looking to be right at $1000 for the frame which is abit costly but worth it. I had tried to work with a metal fab company and they wanted $3000 to build the same thing with steel. My biggest concern will be software to convert the images in a timely fashion.

Yikes! Does that $1000 quote include all the cuts/joining hardware/shipping...preassembly check? I thought I was a little spoiled in cobbling together my parts list for t-slot aluminum @ $300-350, but then again I'm shopping ebay for common scrap sizes sold by a company that's 2-3 hours drive from me. I've already had them ship me a couple 4' sections, which will be the longest I'll need (although they sell up to 92"-96") and I can cut down from there. I Imagine shipping the longer pieces to residential could get ugly if buying long sections with freight shipping formulas...]

I see that you live in Tennessee, so it's a couple states south of me/their warehouse (North-central Indiana), but you might check with them: Search ebay for seller 8020inc. They'll verify shipping fees with you before you're obliged to buy/pay, so no sticker shock to speak of. Unless you're doing something VERY different from my build sketches, I think you could do much better than $1000, but I might be WAY OFF on what they'd charge you shipping-wise. Another thing you might consider is shopping around at a separate vendor for hardware to attach the pieces. This is one of the items that REALLY seems to inflate t-slot build budgets.

I haven't decided whether to build the entire design as 1"x1" (or the closest metric equivalent) or to use 2"x2" for the four upright corners and the rest 1x1". That quote is from all 1x1's, but having 2x2's on the corners would allow me to route cabling down the inside of the t-slots cavity for lighting and whatnot (I've considered counterweights inside the columns to offset platen raising/lowering for a cleaner look), and this didn't change my costs too much (again, buying 4 x 48" sections, since they'd reasonably have that length scrap available indefinitely.

I should definitely add that I will be doing the final cuts/drilling/assembly myself. I have an old friend a hour away in Indianapolis with access to a band saw and drill press, although I'm less concerned about the drilling...it depends on the hardware I use for assembly; he only asks that I have the measurements jotted down before I arrive. Cuts alone add $3-7 a piece from what I've browsed in the past. It all adds up, up, UP!

In any case, I'm envious of your choice to go t-slot aluminum. It should be quite the sight to behold when finished. Keep us posted.

[Royal_Scan]

The final quote shipping and all is $1,111.25 . That is using 1.5" extrusion for the frame, I did however use 1" for making my tray mounts. My design is a lot different since I'm going with a non-platten approach. It also allows me to slide the trays apart to allow for book bindings, but also removed the trays to shoot larger flat images if needed. I used part #6860 with handles to allow the upper frame to lower so fit in the back of a mini-van for transport. My total frame weight is only 50 lbs before adding lights and cameras, so that a single person can lift it.

[Shyamasundara]

Hello,

I am Shyamasundara in Bangalore, India.

I am a practitioner of Gaudiya Vaisnavism/Vedanta and student of Vedic astrology, astronomy and philosophy of divination. My first foray at digitization was in 1982 when I microfilmed my teacher’s personal library including rare astrological texts. Currently I have a digital library of about 5200 books/scholarly articles (JSTOR) in PDF and growing daily.

When I first came to India and was living in the ashrama I could carry all my possessions in one hand. That gradually snowballed to the point that when I was living in North Carolina just before moving back to India just for my books alone one and half rooms were required with 6 foot bookshelves stacked with books and magazines lining the walls. This made me a lot less mobile than I wanted to be. Back in 1995 I had the idea of digitizing my whole library and turn them into PDFs. I learned about scanning and used the destructible method to quickly scan books using a page feeder but I didn’t like the idea of cutting the books and then putting them back together with a spiral binding.

Here in Bangalore I got a PlusTek 3600 and hired a girl to scan books for me. This protects most books except those with weak bindings. After scanning I process with Acrobat 9 pro’s ClearScan which makes the book a pleasure to read in many cases also makes the file size smaller not to mention searchable. Then I have her make links from the TOC as well as bookmark the document for easy navigation.

I prefer PDF because of the ability to annotate, which I do a lot of—the book that hasn’t been written in hasn’t been read.

After the books are scanned I donate them to a gurukula (traditional school) library in Bengal. But even though she has scanned hundreds of books for me it is still not enough because the number of books still left to scan is large. (I just bought a whole library of Ayurvedic texts and plan to buy collections on other schools of Vedanta). My girl wore out the Plustek 3600 so I got the new 3800, but at a maximum rate of 100 pages/hour at 600 dpi this is way too slow as she can only reasonably scan 500-600 pages/day.

I was thinking of getting the Atiz but was put off by the cost of 700,000 rupees almost, US$13,000 (compared to 19,000 Rupees for the Plustek 3800). Then I came across this website and it got my attention.

I am not a builder but am putting together a team of persons who are engineers and fabricators who have made things before and who will build it for me once they get the tools needed and a design settled on. I will just pay for cost of materials. At this point I just need some help in choosing the appropriate design.

I have doubts about the current Standard DIY design http://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtop ... =14&t=1192 because of the need to lift the book up. I have a girl doing the scanning and I want something she can handle with ease. Also since very few of the books in my collection are paperbacks there is no advantage to this design for me.

I will continue to look through the website for a design but would appreciate any advice received. I have to make choice by the end of the week as key members of my engineering team will be arriving and we need to finalize on the design so they can make things happen. I would prefer to get things right the first time. I am of course assuming that I can get all the parts required here in India, bearings may be a problem since no one uses roller blades in India.

[Stevo]

Hi guys, my name is Steve, I live in sunny Australia.  I am here due to reading and learning difficulties related to my sickness that has unfortunately resulted in a backlog of reading over the last ten years +.  So I have to convert my library of around 100k pages to searchable text I can also use text to speech software on.  Unfortunately this also includes single pages, so I need to do high speed adf on both books and single pages, or spend a year scanning at two pages a minute (when I can get to feed it).  I am taking heaps of supps just to get this far, otherwise I would not be able to construct a machine or research it.  Hence, I might need some advice, but I am pretty handy on design advice myself, so hope to contribute some ideas too.

Firstly, in the spirit of co-operation, I understand that automatic document feeding is difficult:

- Has anybody tried a small quiet low powered suction device to grab the page bit flipping.

- Alternatively, has anybody trued generating a static electric field on a device, or the page, to grab a page, and possibly (as suggested on another forum by somebody else) change the charge if a page to seperate pages stuck together.

I hope these ideas might be useful.

Steve.