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Dave Marshall

Mon Jan 04 2010, 04:43AM

Registered Member #16 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:22PM
Location: New Wilmington, PA
Posts: 554

I'm kicking around building a book scanner to put a few of my favorite/most useful books onto my e-reader. I've been poking around online, and there are a number of designs that look good.

DIY Book Scanning has lots of interesting ideas and suggestions.

I'm leaning toward a design similar to this:

(Note: This image is from

, and was taken by user Antoha-SPB)

Most designs seem to use two cameras, and they can capture both visible pages simultaneously. Many also keep the book facing up, which makes the pages easier to turn, but it also requires you to raise and lower a clear screen over the book to hold it flat.

Given that I only plan on scanning a few books, I think this design will work well with a little modification, and will let me use my single DSLR. I plan on building it in such a way that the clear book rack pivots on a bearing and acts a little like a rocking chair. Rotating it to one side will line up one page, and a quick ~45 degree rotation will bring the opposite page into frame.

I'll likely use a pair of mini fluorescent lights with a diffuser for the lighting, and I'll build the entire rack so the height can be adjusted, allowing smaller books to be moved closer to the camera.

I'm still messing around with the software end of it. It will largely depend on if I end up with the nook e-reader, or the Sony Touch Edition. Each handles various formats slightly different, and the Sony doesn't render color pages in black and white quite as effectively as the nook.

Anybody built or used a book scanner and able to offer any advice? Critiques and suggestions are always welcome.

-Dave

...

Mon Jan 04 2010, 05:04AM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

I have been working on scanning my electronics textbook at school, although it ended up being a little easier for me since our school was too cheap to order the book with a binding, I just dropped it into an ancient color scanner I found at school and a few days later had 15gb of image files.

Likewise, we have been focused on the image processing more, trying to get all 1000 pages to fit in a reasonably sized file, and taking care of the junk that comes from the scanning process. We had really good results using a book that we had a digital version of, using the djvu format we managed to compress the 1600 page book into a 75MB file (down from about 40GB of PNG files!) at 600DPI. You could see the compression in some of the images, but they are still perfectly legible.

What I have learned is that the better the original image you can get the easier the process will be, the book we manually scanned was done on a fairly ancient scanner that doesn't give the greatest scans which has been a major headache now that we are trying to compress the images.

Dave Marshall

Mon Jan 04 2010, 03:34PM

Registered Member #16 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:22PM
Location: New Wilmington, PA
Posts: 554

I'll be using a 12MP Olympus DSLR, though I'll probably knock the resolution back slightly to get more images on the card, especially considering the very low resolution of Ebook reader screens (I think the very highest are about 1024x800) That should help keep file sizes down, though full color will ensure its probably still at least 150MB for the first textbook I plan on scanning.

The camera captures in JPEG and RAW. The RAW files are *much* larger, and they're a little slower to work with in large numbers as far as actual rendering time goes, but I think they might be slightly less effort to tinker with, as its easy to just tell CS3 to treat every image exactly the same and then ignore it for a couple hours.

I'm not familiar with the djvu file format, and I don't think either of my prospective readers support it. Whats the background on it? Have you tinkered with EPUB or any of those?

-Dave

...

Mon Jan 04 2010, 04:29PM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

DjVu is a free (and while the encoder is not open source, there are viewers that are) compression system that works 5-10 times better than jpeg compression for most things, and is supposed to be able to render the images faster than a normal image viewer. It works by splitting the image into a background/foreground, and only actually compressing the useful information on the page, along with a bunch of other trickery.

I know the iphone supports it, but I don't think that an android reader has been released for it (as would be required for the nook), and amazon probably will never support it, so in that sense it probably won't help you much.

Mads Barnkob

Mon Jan 04 2010, 05:08PM

Registered Member #1403 Joined: Tue Mar 18 2008, 06:05PM
Location: Denmark, Odense C
Posts: 1968

Maybe you can get some inspiration from this guy, this is also a invaluable resource of old electronic books, save them all or at least the link :)

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