DIY Book Scanner

I personally do the same as camwow - I try to match the camera to what I see with my eyes. There are many different ways to capture books - many different intentions - but for me a copy of the book as-i-found-it, or as-i-marked-it-up - that's the digital book I want.

Wow. Extensive and very thoughtful, with lots of great illustrations. Thank you.

Right. Very interesting, John. At the end of the day "The Cloud" just means "somebody else's computer". I don't trust the cloud at all. Companies and services come and go. And who knows what happens to all those computers that somebody else once owned? In the olden days, when I was young ;) we ran o...

What worries me is storage, reliability, and accessibility of the electronic copy. There's a notion in the digitizing community: LOCKSS ("Lots of copies keeps stuff safe"). Libraries like John's are precious and should definitely be backed up in several places. I know mine will be backed up on the ...

Thus, what this post describes is the equipment and processes used to transform the book media, without the controls of the publishers, in a way which fits my personal use. If digital book ownership was the same as physical book ownership this transformation would not be required. Perfectly said. Q...

John, thank you so much for this update and for sharing this insightful and impressive work. Might be a slightly sensitive question for some, but I see in your original post that you discard some or all of the books after debinding and scanning. Two questions: *Did you proceed this way and are you h...

Noitaenola, would you consider compiling a PDF to get people engaged? I would like to read/see your manual but compiling tex is a high barrier for some.

Konos, is that your video? Cool stuff.

The snap system are a good substitute. For the record, the lens pitch used on the Archivist was 10LPI (lines per inch) and the lenses are the cylindrical type where the focal plane is the back surface of the lenticular.

I have always wanted a thing like this, but with even more "reach". Does it stay up pretty well?