DIY Book Scanner

You know what I would suggest as an alternative to scanning? Just get a camera, point it at a page, display the output on a monitor or on your TV, and zoom in until it's legible. That way, all 7000 books can be read whenever you have access to a display device. You won't be able to read your books o...

I used to use ImageMagick to convert ST's TIFs into PDF, and PDFTK to stitch the PDFs into a single file.

I've started going platenless too on the "horizontal" format scanner, at least for books which don't have images that bleed all the way to the edge of the page -- art books, atlases, magazines, etc. I just have a bit of finger in the image holding the page down. It's not always as flat as an image w...

When you're dealing with a right-angle equilateral triangle (which seems to be the base you're describing, and the base almost everyone builds), you should just need to square your "C" (multiply C by itself), divide the result by 2, and take the square root of that. The answer you get will be the le...

I like your questions, and hope to have time to answer them and provide more pictures over the long weekend. For now, let me just take the easy one -- the angle on my platen is actually 140 degrees. I sort of arrived at it empirically, by seeing how far I needed to open some of my difficult pocket p...

I get a bit frustrated sometimes when I see people fixate on one solution, especially in a case like yours where you will have a limited window of access to a large cache of books. You don't need CHDK to build your scanner. The first scanner I built was a V-shaped platen that wasn't connected to any...

I made a new scanner last night. It's very inexpensive, very portable, and solves a couple of problems which had annoyed me with other scanners I've built. I'm not sure it will replace my more traditional scanner, but it may. I've only scanned one book with it at this point, and I need to beat on it...

I'd be interested in seeing your diffused light scanner too. I haven't tried it myself, but I'd think the main problem with a "white bedsheet" diffuser would be with reflections. If you're diffusing your spot light sources, but still positioning them to avoid reflections, it might make the light acr...

I'm glad you're having good results with Book Scan Wizard, and would recommend that you stick with it for comic books. I still prefer Scan Tailor for novels and similar books which are mostly text, but the panel format of the couple of comic books I processed with it gave it fits -- way more manual ...

Why not just set the margins to zero when you're processing the images in Scan Tailor?