Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple setup

Discussions, questions, comments, ideas, and your projects having to do with DIY Book Scanner software. This includes the Stereo Data Maker software for the cameras, post-processing software, utilities, OCR packages, and so on.

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daniel_reetz
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Re: Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple se

Post by daniel_reetz »

Urf, that's ugly. Attribution is all we have in Open Source.
georg.winkler
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Re: Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple se

Post by georg.winkler »

steve1066d wrote:I was noticing that Booksorber includes Michael Thomas Flanagan's Java Scientific Library (http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/java/)
I just came across your comment and I have to apologize for accidentally including said library file in the distribution. It was a leftover from previous development experiments and has been removed from the public release. Best regards.
poetofpiano
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Re: Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple se

Post by poetofpiano »

Has anyone bought Booksorber and used it enough to tell us whether it is worth buying? I too am very pro-open-source software, but I'm also not tech-savvy and would be willing to pay for easy, quality results...
markvdb
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Re: Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple se

Post by markvdb »

poetofpiano wrote:Has anyone bought Booksorber and used it enough to tell us whether it is worth buying? I too am very pro-open-source software, but I'm also not tech-savvy and would be willing to pay for easy, quality results...
You do realise that there's a lot of high quality free and open source software out there? Book scan wizard, scan tailor, ... The need is simply not there to buy closed source!
Mark
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trader-tx
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Re: Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple se

Post by trader-tx »

.
Being curious about the capabilities of Booksorber, here's the most recent (4 June 2013) review and commentary I can find. (Sorry for the bad language in the article headline.)

http://dcoetzee.tumblr.com/post/5219779 ... booksorber

The writer is clearly using some high end equipment that doesn't give most of us insight on Booksorber capabilities for the lesser hardware we have. Hopefully some reviewer will give that software some test runs with different levels of equipment so we can judge (for what size and complexity of page challenges we have) what kind of equipment is most appropriate.

Yours,
trader-tx
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Big Col
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Re: Booksorber coming soon: Scan with 1 camera and simple se

Post by Big Col »

I've bought Booksorber and used it and I am very pleased with the results.
I've got a single camera setup so have been photographing a batch of odd pages, rotating the book, re-aligning the camera and photographing the corresponding even pages. I then used a lossless rotator to get the pages "upright", renamed them as page numbers, combined the sets of images and they were ready for OCR.
With Booksorber I'm photographing a pair of pages with each exposure, so I'm zipping through a book very quickly. The camera doesn't need to be "tight" on the pages of the book; in fact, it works best zoomed out slightly and the black base showing as a frame. I haven't used an external light - the pop-up flash on the camera provides excellent illumination. The results of the OCR are just as accurate as I have been getting with my original setup.
Booksorber takes quite a while to process the images (I set it off and go and do something else) but there's no rotating to do. Booksorber outputs the complete book as a PDF and a series of individual page jpegs; the jpegs go straight into my OCR program.
For the 25 quid it represents excellent value for money and saves a considerable amount of time.
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