Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[ovencakerugby]

Dear All
My DIY is not quite the same as the others. I have been active scanning for our Family History Society for many years. Books were a great interest and around 8 years ago I removed the side from a Canon lide for book scanning, which I still use for certain situations, when you cannot lay the page on a scanner, so sometimes I am like praying with the scanner, but it works,. If anyone is interested in this I can attach details. Mine has done over 8000 scans to date, but is alittle jaded now.
I spotted your pages on the web because now that I am using a Plustek 3600, having done recently around 10000 pages with it, scantailor seems to be the wish of the virgin's prayer. It is tricky and am using it on my macpro with FMFusion. OK
However I am in contact with a mac software company in germany to properly "lick this into shape". More upon this later.
For those of you who are interested go to www.digitalarchives.co.uk and look what I and a friend have done. Scantailor is OK but clunky and if one clicks the wrong button or omits whatever , no good. But with care it works.
Daniel Reetz said he has compiled this for Mac OS 10. Help please or email me as I can phone the States for free!
AS regards scanners I have a Nikon Coolscan, an A$ Umax Powerlook, an A3 Epson with document feed, a Fujitsu Scansnap, a Canon lide, which gives me a good "armoury"
I have some good ideas re a cheap AO scanner, (for those of you non metric this is 30x40 inches but would like to speak to someone re this
PS have also coverted a photocopier into a proper book scanner. How do I post an image?

Best wishes to you all
Peter Davenport

[rpooh52]

Hello, this is Rpooh52.
I'm a 60 year old software engineer and instructor involved in the flight science operations of the International Space Station. I also love books and mechanical wizardry. I found this group by accident after having seen a news article concerning the Treventus ScanRobot. What a Joy.
Personal scanning has been in the back of my mind for years sort of like "if I could fly...". I love books and read many more than I can afford to buy. A Kindle would be ideal but 80% of my books come from the local library. I would love to be able to carry my current checkouts on a thumb drive to the various computers that I travel between during the day. I use Microsoft Reader on my laptop.
So for now I'm just a lurker but reading the Beta 2 and Daniel Reetz's 3rd generation machine diaries was the most excitement I've had in years. What fun! I'll post after I get smart enough not to sound like an idiot.

Rpooh52

[Margism]

Rpooh52,

Your post articulated something that I have had trouble articulating, but feel very strong;u in my gut, in terms of the power of the Book Scanner and the digitization process for marginalized and remote communities. Consider the communities that are equipped with some basic technology (computers, IP phones, one broadband connection shared by 200 people, etc.), and who 'depend'' on the occasional book drives that brings books to their local schools. Often they are eventually given to kids so that they can take home something that is theirs, that they want to read over and over again, but what happens that that one single copy is destroyed or lost? This is a huge argument for digitlizing whatever existing physical books there are within one community, for archival purposes, because it's not like they can walk into a book store or a library and get it replaced; a book lost or destroyed in that setting is a profoundly sad for the individual (likely a young person) who really loved it. "Hoping" that the next time a charity swings by with books, and that the particular title will arrive along with it, is not as useful as keeping a digital copy, and printing a copy out on demand to 'replace' that physical copy.

I know copyright laws can get tangled in this, but short of mass-printing the digital versions, and trying to sell them some how, to me the fundamental motivation is not very different from the way I would give a book away to someone to read after I am done with it, except taking into account the isolation and remoteness and the lack of easy access to book content. That's for sharing your thoughts.

[rpooh52]

"I know copyright laws can get tangled in this, but short of mass-printing the digital versions, and trying to sell them some now, to me the fundamental motivation is not very different from the way I would give a book away to someone to read after I am done with it, except taking into account the isolation and remoteness and the lack of easy access to book content. "

I think all of us in this forum feel that a little "cottage industry" guerrilla copying for these kind of projects is justifiable as a not-for-profit, humanitarian effort that has little impact on corporate profits. There is little lost revenue since the people can't afford the books in the first place... That's going to be my defense at trial anyway.


rpooh52

[StevePoling]

I've said it before. Fair use is the legal concept that allows libraries to install coin-op Xerox machines. Fair use also lets you legally record TV off the air and lend your recording to friends and family. The copyright issues in play with DIY bookscanners have to do with legally establishing that the following are "fair use":
1) I scan my book to read in my Kindle or some like device.
2) I lend you my scanner to do the same.
3) Or charge for it like a library charges for Xerox copies.

My experience with ebooks leads me to believe that all of the above produce equivalents of the analog cassette tapes I made in the '70s. The quality just isn't there. You have to pour a lot of time into tweaks and book design work to make your epub files look as good as something you'll buy on your Kindle. DIY bookscanners won't destroy book publishers like cassette tape recorders didn't destroy the music industry.

To the contrary, when an ebook is unavailable for any price, DIY bookscanners serve to route around market failures.

[tarkowski]

Hello, my name is Alek Tarkowski. I won't probably build my own scanner soon (I wish I did!) but I'm interested in post-processing software. I run a small digitzation project called "Open the book", which is about publishing online versions of Polish scientific books, under Creative Commons licenses. We run into all sorts of problems with our OCR process, as we want to provide, alongside scans, correct text versions (which also enable us to do fulltext search on the books).

We're collaborating with Polish digital libraries, which run large-scale, professional digitsation processes, but they usually only make scans, or use the raw OCR that's full of errors, assuming that it's good enough for basic search.

So I'm curious to find out and discuss how this can be done better.

Alek.

[marc]

Hi all,

My name is Marc. I started searching for book digitization information about 6 months ago and was about two clicks away from buying a ScanSnap, cutting the bindings off all my books, and feeding them through the sheet feeder. Being a book lover, it was going to pain me every step of the way, but with plans to move to another country, the cost of shipping my beloved books was going to be too much.

A last desperate search on the interweb unearthed a link to the instructables build, which then led me to this site! I was so glad that there were other people in the world dreaming about the same things I was. I have read through nearly all the builds here and am really excited to see the new 'Standard' build thread. I haven't built many things other than software, and don't have many tools, so I think it will be a good place to start. I ordered the first of my A590s yesterday, so I'm committed now.

Professionally, I write patient monitoring / operating room software for a large hospital system in Ohio. Maybe I can use some of my development skills to help with the software projects going on here.

--Marc

[piticu]

Hi there
Cezar Popescu it's my name. 33 romanian. Right now i'm interested about "post-scanning" phase of digitization, repository, metadata harvesting and sharing collection. I've scanned a 600pages book in order to have material to play with with a plain old flatbed scanner. It took me almost 2 weeks to complete the easy part so, naturally, i'm looking for alternative solution.
I'll post my findings on my personal blog.
I'm also a photographer and passionate printer. Nice to meet you all.

[MetroHopper]

Hello! I am a veteran zinester from the 1980s/1990s who is set to open a small press publishing house in Los Angeles. I usta write for loads of rags as well, such as Flipside, Ben is Dead, MRR, HitList and several others.

I came upon this site while searching for a book-scanning service in Los Angeles. (Sadly, there appear to be no one that can do the job I desire without destroying the book; egads!) While wondering why, after more than two decades of doing everything else d.i.y., I never thought of building my own book scanner (I never really needed one, although it would have been nice to have scanned all those thousands of fanzines I no longer possess), I thought: Why not see if there is someone here in the greater L.A. area who may be amenable to working out a deal to scan a book?

So, if anyone is up for such a thing, I would love to hear from you.

[argumenterror]

Hey, I'm a student looking to save money on books. Evil textbook companies are evil & full of injustice.

I'm creating my own instance of cratylus's scanner in my dorm room. I'll hopefully be done with it soon.
http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/vie ... ?f=1&t=274