Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple setup

[georg.winkler]

Hello,

I'm the developer of Booksorber, a new software intended to make book scanning cheap, fast and painless.
The focus is on intelligent algorithms, so that a very simple hardware setup is sufficient. (The scanning rig can be assembled in just one minute from a few components that many people will have already available).
Check out the details at http://www.booksorber.com.

The working prototype is already very promising and I'm planning on a commercial release soon. If you like the idea, please consider supporting my team at http://www.indiegogo.com/booksorber!

I'm a fan of all your efforts presented here, and I'd be grateful for any feedback, be it ideas, tips or criticism ...

Many thanks!

[daniel_reetz]

Hello,

I'm a fan of all your efforts presented here, and I'd be grateful for any feedback, be it ideas, tips or criticism ...

Make it Open Source and I'll contribute. If it's not Open Source it doesn't fit the ethos of a lot of book scanning people.

[georg.winkler]

Hi Daniel,

I understand your viewpoint. I also dedicate a major share of my free time to "honorary work" (like leading a boy scouts group for the last 11 years for example ) and I like the idea of sharing knowledge. It's just that I need the time investment into SOME projects to pay off (in the strict sense of the word), so open source is not an option for me at the moment.

Still I'd like to listen to potential user requests to make a better product - and I figure that many of you might be interested!

Besides, booksorber will be cheaply priced, and I hope it will be an attractive solution for people who typically have some camera equipment available, but no time for building more evolved scanning rigs.

Best regards

[mellow-yellow]

Thanks Georg for posting this. It seems possible to accomplish much of this with open source software. In fact, it got me curious if CHDK could handle this, using its motion detection scripting, so I posted the question here:

http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?to ... 2#msg87752

In fact, at least one other successful attempt has been posted on these forums, though it doesn't wait for motion to stop; it waits after motion begins (but the post also refers to the former with a link)

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=484

[georg.winkler]

That's a cool idea, and would reduce the need for even one more piece of hardware!
I used CHDK myself on a Canon, for book scanning - but only the timer function. The timed operation worked quite nicely as a fallback solution, but slowed down overall efficiency compared to a remote trigger (since you have to orient your timing on those 5% "page-turning hiccups").
I'll have a look into this, maybe I can contribute something...

[georg.winkler]

Hi again, I'd just like to point to some example pdf-files I've uploaded to the media section (http://www.booksorber.com/index.php?page=media#pdf) of the Booksorber homepage. It should illustrate the current state of the output quality after automatic processing, which already gives quite good results as the basis for OCR by third-party software! (I'm regularly processing all my university books which I've scanned this way with ClearScan OCR mode integrated into Adobe Acrobat, for size reduction and the possibility to search and annotate.)

[blorg]

"Make it Open Source and I'll contribute. If it's not Open Source it doesn't fit the ethos of a lot of book scanning people."
-Seconded.

Open-source is always an option for everyone always.

[xorpt]

It's interesting I think. Open-source and commercial projects can coexist... the contribution method is just different (and I think I'm probably not the only one on this forum working for a commercial SW company...)

I would be curious about the pricing...

[MerlinMags]

I see the booksorber software is now on sale for 29 euros. I will give the free trial (10 pages) a go and see how it performs. Am hoping it makes all the software side very simple...

[steve1066d]

I was noticing that Booksorber includes Michael Thomas Flanagan's Java Scientific Library (http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/java/)

It appears that the project is using that library without permission, as its only licensed for non-commercial use.

It also didn't even attribute the use of that library, which is required for even non-commercial use.