Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[daniel_reetz]

Welcome, Rhea27! Thanks for signing up. Please post pictures of your rig someday, and we'll be happy to help you with Scan Tailor or Book Scan Wizard.

[dlarge]

Hello, all, new member, longtime wannabe book scanner. I'm especially interested in contemporary and classic math and science texts. I don't have a rig yet but I'm looking on Ebay for a good camera to get started. I'm looking forward to learning all I can!

[Ryan_phx]

Hello, all, new member, longtime wannabe book scanner. I'm especially interested in contemporary and classic math and science texts. I don't have a rig yet but I'm looking on Ebay for a good camera to get started. I'm looking forward to learning all I can!

Welcome! Don't forget to check Amazon's used marketplace--I got two refurbished, straight-from-the-factory Canon A480s for $55 each. That's cheaper than I could find them on eBay at the time.

[TheScanBro]

Well, my name is Kyle and I found this site about 9 months ago while looking for a way to put my paperback books on my Kindle so I wouldn't have to re-buy them on the Kindle store. The scanners all looked really cool but I didn't build any of them because I didn't think I had all the materials and I didn't want to spend the money for them. Well, over Christmas break I was pretty bored and just decided to start building as much of the scanner (the standard version) that I could, with materials I had found lying around. Turns out that I had almost everything I needed, and with a little improvisation, about $15 at good ol' depot, and some elbow grease, I was able to build about half of a (very primitive) standard version. After Christmas things got busy and my half-finished scanner just sat around, but just yesterday I decided to go ahead and finish it, so I did, and despite some issues (which I'll probably ask for help with in some other post) I'm pretty happy with the results. I'm looking forward to learning how to improve and use the scanner, and eventually put some of my paperbacks onto my Kindle!

[the.traveller]

Dear Reader,

I would like to introduce myself and some of the plans I have for the Wikipedia of the forum.

On the internet I use the.traveller because in the past I was able to travel to all the favorite computershows in the world. I've attended Comdex in America, France and Portugal. Cebit in Germany, Smau in Italy and shows in Taiwan. And of course the usergroup shows (HCC) in the Netherlands.

I too have a large pile of books which is overwhelming and causes friction between the different family members. So I went out searching for a possibility to reduce the space invaded by books,magazines and newspaper clippings but still keeping them at hand.
Well scanning them in the traditional way takes to much time. Even with the aio printers at work the quality gets better and the time taken did go down, but it still takes a long time, which is taking time from me being with my family.
I started searching the net for other solutions. This way finding companies like Artiz and Kirtas.
Since I didn't win the lottery yet I had to look further.

In this way I found this forum. To make the introduction shorter I started reading and searching for a scanner. But somewhere in November 2010 I couldn't reach the website anymore. In the meantime I spoke to a friend about the website and he is onboard with me to build a scanner. Now after 4 months I finally can access the forum again.

But I still think a newbie like me has to read a lot of comments on existing scanner builds which of course very nice but I have symptons of withdrawal because of the long time I couldn't access the site.

This last week everything has been speeded up since I already have bought 2 Canon Ixus 105 cameras. At my friends place my son and I helped cleaning his garage. He has some electric tools and he is an electric engineer. So as soon as we decided on the scanner, made a drawing and bought some acrylic we can start building.

But that's for later. See you at Hardware and Agora and hopefully at the Wikipedia as a contributer to the Wiki.

[viveik]

Hi, greetings from Hong Kong !

Most of Asia is DIY challenged ! Living spaces are small , Home Depot type operations unavailable....

Will it go against the DIY nature of this project if I offered to mass produce a scanner design in my factory in China ?
I have plastic injection machines and electronic assembly line that could make this available to those that cant DIY it.

Let me know if it can serve the project.

I am looking forward to building some and gift to communities in China and india.

Thank you.

Viveik

[ortega]

Hi, greetings from Hong Kong !

Most of Asia is DIY challenged ! Living spaces are small , Home Depot type operations unavailable....

Will it go against the DIY nature of this project if I offered to mass produce a scanner design in my factory in China ?
I have plastic injection machines and electronic assembly line that could make this available to those that cant DIY it.

Let me know if it can serve the project.

I am looking forward to building some and gift to communities in China and india.

Thank you.

Viveik

hi, for me would be great!
i'm from europe and i also live in a small apartment. i kit for a book scanner would be great.
please keep us informed.

[daniel_reetz]

Hi Viveik! That sounds VERY interesting! Let's work together! Can you please contact me at danreetz@gmail.com so we can discuss things?

[jgreely]

I'm J Greely, network/sysadmin/QA/janitor/whatever guy at a Silicon Valley startup and a serious amateur photographer, active on the Internet since the Eighties. The walls of my house are covered with well-stuffed bookshelves, but for the most part, those aren't the books I want to scan.

I've been studying Japanese for several years, and one of the most frustrating roadblocks is when you run out of "student editions" and "graded readers", and try to start reading things written for a native audience. Children's books and comics can keep you going for a while, and there are tools like Rikai to help with web sites, but eventually you find yourself with a book you really want to read, and resign yourself to carrying around printed and electronic dictionaries and struggling through each page.

Back when Foothill College still had a group reading class, I put together some simple scripts to add phonetic guides (furigana) to texts and create matching vocabulary lists, making nicely-formatted PDF ebooks for the class. I typed in a few short stories (painfully slow), used a flatbed scanner and Abbyy FineReader Pro to OCR a few more, and found some easy-to-read out-of-copyright texts on the Aozora Bunko site.

Two months ago, I dusted off those scripts and got serious about automating the process, gluing together a number of Open Source projects into a system that can convert a novel-length text file into a PDF ebook with a matching per-page vocabulary list that's precisely matched to my reading level, in about 30 seconds. I've read more real Japanese in the past two months than in the previous two years, and it's all material that I actually want to read.

Unfortunately, while I've been able to find "unofficial" ebooks of some of the novels I own, most of them are low-resolution scans that are iffy for OCR (200-250 DPI heavily-compressed JPEG), and the online community is heavily biased toward the most popular recent anime-style series. If I want to read any of the random histories, mysteries, biographies, travel books, SF, etc that I've bought, I need to scan them myself.

I had looked at commercial book scanners in the past, and bookmarked the original Instructables page, but it wasn't until my vacation trip to Japan was canceled by recent events that I found myself with enough time and motivation to go through these forums in detail and work out the details of a scanner that I could build without much effort or expense. An $8 platen from TAP Plastics and an hour with a bucket of Legos was all it took to start making high-quality scans of paperbacks.

Well, that and the thousands of dollars of studio photography gear that I already owned, which included an excellent camera, a sturdy copystand, and a commercial flash system that's ridiculously overpowered for the job. It's always nice when one hobby subsidizes another.

My current scanner is only capable of handling paperbacks up to a bit over 5x7 inches, but I still have enough Legos to scale the design up for a 10x14 platen. The 8MP camera may not prove adequate at that size, but fortunately I have a few more dollars invested in a 24MP DSLR and lenses...

And someday, if I get really ambitious, I have a nearly complete archive of the old tabloid-sized Upper & Lower Case typography magazine; decades of type-geekery!

-j

[zavierx918]

Hi everyone. Name is Mike, I've been checking out this site for awhile now. Started gathering materials ( have a lot of it in the garage). Have thousands of books that I've wanted to scan without damaging them. I'm thinking of using Canon Powershot A495's on the scanner. Does anyone have this as a setup and if so, have any advice for me? Thanks.