Post something about yourself here (The Hello Thread)

[daniel_reetz]

Tom, welcome.

We call that an "air platen" -- see these search results. Many of them positive! It definitely works.

Chains are a great idea, we've never seen an example of that, AFAIK.

[Annie]

Hello DIYers and booklovers etc.

I'm originally from the US but have been living in Germany since 1995. I have been hoarding books since forever -it started with Vonnegut and Agatha Christie and spread to Heinlein and any and all sci-fi and fantasy. My academic interest for years was German literature (hence the move to Germany) and I can't let go of any of those books either. My inspiration to digitize came when I mentioned to a friend how much my iPod had changed my life since I can have all my music with me. I joked that I wish it were possible with books, and then I realized that it probably is possible. The next step was teh google and now I am here.

I DIY anywhere and everywhere, and I see failure as the mother of improvement, so I tend to dive right in and build lots of models and prototypes to test out ideas. Currently I have three cradles with platens made of shoe-boxes and picture-frames, and I've been experimenting with different cameras (mine and those of my three kids) and mounting systems. I have much to learn

I spent last night trying to get chdk set up on my canon A460 (which I will not be using long-term since 5mio pixels is NOT enough). I also landed myself an A480 on ebay last night for 36 Euros. That's with 32MBcard, battery charger and trimmings, so w00t! The rest of my materials are all re-purposed (garbage, stuff from attic or basement or cannibalized from my household). There will probably be exceptions, but I am a sustainability nut and a garbage-warrior (I make handbags out of my kids old jeans and stuff like that) so sustainabilit yis a guiding design principle for me.

I guess my first digitizing experiences come from doing foto-documentations of flip-chart presentations or workshops - one of my day jobs is workshop moderation, team-building and coaching. I've also made various attempts at digitizing all the artwork my kids have made over the years.

I'm equal parts excited and intimidated by chdk and all of the computer aspects of this,cand looking forward to a serious learning curve!

I've spent too many hours on this in the past days and I'm psyched to keep working on it. I'll be posting a build thread once I get some stuff sorted out.

Hats off to all of you for sharing the amazing work you've done!

cheers,
Annie

[steve1066d]

Greetings!

I've had an interest in bookscanning for a few years. I’ve got a lot of books, and I like the concept of having them all available and searchable.

With the copyright situation in the US I came to the conclusion that the only way bookscanning to work was a simple way for an individual person to do the scanning. There are services out there that can scan a bunch of photos or documents cheaply, but nothing for books. So I started working on a solution a couple of years ago that could use a camera to scan books. I'm not too mechanically inclined, so that while I was aware of Atiz’s BookDrive, it wasn't anything I considered doing DIY. I worked on a solution based on first taking a picture of a page of dots, and using that to calculate the page warp. By taking pictures of the grid of dots every 30 or so pages, and interpolating from page to page, it could pretty effectively dewarp a page. I got it working as a prototype, and I thought about making a commercial product, but lost interest until recently, when I decided I wanted to start pursuing bookscanning again.

I quickly found out about diybookscanner.org, and decided that a DIY scanner was just what I needed. I made a pretty much standard "new standard scanner", and it is working great, but I found the post-processing software lacking. So I've spent the last couple of months working on some software that can handle post-processing with a minimal amount of time per book. While Scan Tailor works great for post-processing with the best possible result, I'm looking for something that works, without the time involved of making things perfect. That’s the niche I’m going for with BookScanWizard.

I work as a Java developer, and while image manipulation isn't something I do much at work, its been fun playing with it.

[kusnick]

Hello folks. My name is Marcos Kusnick from Brazil, a History teacher with previous experience in computer maintenance and still “mad scientist”. I and some friends just finished our bookscanner. We are conducting several tests. We are testing, among others, two Olympus T100 cameras. To use such cheaper cameras we developed a mechanical shutter device activated by thin wire ropes (used on bike stuff). As soon as possible we will post a video about it. Cheers.

[daniel_reetz]

Marcos! That is some beautiful work!

I would love nothing more than to see your mechanical triggers. Thanks for joining, and looking forward to more details about your design. It looks totally awesome.

BTW, we have other members from Brazil - Dario de Moura is in Belo Horizonte and helped me make this scanner design fully open source. http://www.diybookscanner.org/news/?p=66 - in fact, he did most of the work in creating a perfect model and cleaning up the artwork.

[Scott]

Hey everyone,

I'm Scott and I came here to find a cheap and reliable way to convert badly damaged documents into electronic form. My parents own a small veterinary clinic and just had a pretty nasty fire. Almost everything was lost, but they were able to salvage some paper records. Unfortunately the records are too badly damaged to keep so we need to convert them to electronic form ASAP. We talked to a document recovery company and they want several thousand dollars for the service so I have been looking for alternatives. Judging by the community you have built here, this looks like a great place to start!

[daniel_reetz]

Welcome, Scott! Be sure to check out this thread about using a copystand, which you can replace with a tripod and some desk lamps. Additionally, check out this approach by Misty De Meo (more) to see some basic one-camera setups. You can definitely do this in a hurry using only some kind of camera stand, some lights, and your time.

[piolenc]

I'm a packrat who has been collecting books, technical reports and miscellanea for over forty years. In pre-PC days I took an interest in microfilm and microfiche, accumulating two cameras and several viewers. Now I need to find a way to convert two shoeboxes worth of microfiche and microfilm, but that's another project. But even with all the microfilming, the last time I moved it took a forty-foot container to hold my books, so I really need to convert as many as possible of those to bytes. Needless to say, this forum is going to be very, very helpful. I hope I can do something useful in return, but I'm not sure what that might be.

[daniel_reetz]

There are a number of people here interested in fiche/film digitizing, so any wisdom you have there or research you want to do on that would be most welcome.

[diyscanner212]

Hi,

My name is David and I am a book scanner... there I said it. I'm currently on my third scanner. My first was my arm, holding the book out at arm's length and holding the camera up to my face and taking a picture of the page. Worked and I did most of a book that way but was slow and needed a lot of correcting of the image. My second was laying the book on the table, and standing over it holding it open with one hand and the camera in the other hand. (My tripod was missing a part so was still holding the camera.) I finally took a sheet of glass made for a picture frame and used that to hold the pages. I finished up the first book and started on a second this way. This is when I discovered this site. My current scanner is the cardboard box, camera now on a tripod and using two loose pieces of picture frame glass to hold the pages flat. I finished up the second book and have done 5 and a half books with this setup. Oh btw, using my old Canon Digital Rebel, first generation, with an IR remote to trigger the camera. Now I'm planning to build a better scanner a bit at a time. First plan to make a real platen instead of the two loose sheets of glass.

Software I've been using is Lightroom 2, Finereader 9 (and now 10), and since I found the site, ScanTailor. ScanTailor has certainly made the process easier, thank you greatly!

My main goal is the quest to have a digital library that matches my physical library. At the rate I buy books I doubt I will ever finish but it keeps me out of trouble. Seems to work well for my hardbacks but the paperbacks worry me. Been checking out the forums and noticed the upside down or "house" scanner which looks interesting. I'm blown away by the creativity of the community here, really makes me start thinking.

Anyway, just saying hello before going back to scanning.

David