8 ms·

DIY Book Scanner

340 points by bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago

djoldman 5y ago
Here it is in action: http://tenrec.builders/quill/guide/scanning/scan/ http://tenrec.builders/quill/guide/scanning/scan/
totetsu 5y ago
Last year I bought a czur book scanner that looks kind of like a lamp to try and archive some 100 year old books I had limited access to. The resolution of the camera was so low I ended up balancing my phone on top and getting better images just using it as a light.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I find the latest Czur works well enough for non-glossy stuff. The broader scanning problem I find is that, beyond the small must scan category, I find I have so much stuff that generally it's not very practical.
Topgamer7 5y ago
I remember reading about Google's book scanner that operated automatically using vacuum pressure to gently flip pages. I'd love to see an open source variety of that.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I think about Google's scanner project a lot. I wonder if they are still scanning? I would love if they found a way to offer those books (authors would have to agree) to the world. If they did, I would forgive them for tracking me all these years. I'd even put up with ads in the books.
  - david_allison 5y ago
    They do if the books are out of copyright, and they're often copied to archive.org (and then transcribed via Wikisource) when this happens. sample: https://books.google.im/books?id=Me8CAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.im/books?id=Me8CAAAAQAAJ&printsec=front...
    - floathub 5y ago
      And you can order a bound paperback book made from the scans of just about any out-of-copyright google book. From the Harvard Bookstore (or anyone else that has an Espresso Book Machine): https://www.ondemandbooks.com/as/?t=Hamlet&c=google https://www.ondemandbooks.com/as/?t=Hamlet&c=google
- supernova87a 5y ago
  I don't know where to find a picture of it, but I remember seeing a video of one of their book scanners. Or maybe it was just one version of them. Picture a wedge (shaped like the V of a book lying open on a table) that could move up and down. The wedge would descend and insert itself into the V of the book's pages, then rising up would suck the 2 left and right sheets against the sides of the wedge, scanning as it went. Then it would blow those 2 pages to the left (or right I forget) and descend again and do the next set. I thought it was pretty cool. Have never seen something like it since.
- markvdb 5y ago
  Automated page turning is an incredibly complex problem to tackle. It won't gain you as much as you'd think either. "Book" and "page" are a surprisingly difficult to define categories. If my experience helping to build the diybookscanner.org project taught me anything, it's that picking the low hanging fruit of small efficiency improvements to the (semi-)manual process is so much more effective...
  - donalhunt 5y ago
    Which is probably why some of the scanning locations used something very similar to this DIY effort (I'm familiar with the Oxford, UK location that existed in the mid 00s). Humans turned the pages with the finger tips mentioned in another comment.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Google Linear Book Scanner https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MNqINDm1lk https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MNqINDm1lk
  - rckoepke 5y ago
    See also: https://linearbookscanner.org/ https://linearbookscanner.org/
Topgamer7 5y ago
I've used scan tailor in the past to convert a outboard motor manual to pdf, it's pretty powerful. I didn't have a proper setup, but my results still came out decently. https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced
david_allison 5y ago
I'm very interested in getting into archival (getting started this month after a few more conversations). Your buy button[0] is broken. You're potentially missing out on a few sales due to this. Is 2x 4GB SD card sufficient for your purposes? I've been quoted 50MB TIFF images as a standard, and a lot of books wouldn't fit without swapping SDs at that size. [0] http://store.diybookscanner.org/ http://store.diybookscanner.org/
- zwayhowder 5y ago
  If you use pi-scan the images are saved to a USB drive instead of the SDcards.
- fernly 5y ago
  archiving what? just curious.
  - david_allison 5y ago
    I want to digitize the entire linguistic and spoken corpus of a critically endangered language[0] and convert it to a searchable format to aid in language revival, academic research, and ensuring that an informed debate can occur when the modern usages of the language differ from traditional usages of the language. Most of the printed books are scattered, but available, but it's akin to an iceberg: there's a significant amount of 'submerged' knowledge about the language in written manuscripts and recorded audio, and this is where a lot of the value comes from. Printed texts are primarily religious, and getting the colloquial usages of words and phrases is very useful. Many manuscripts aren't digitized at all, or are available and need transcription. The language is relatively well-recorded (dating back to at least the late 16th century in written form), and yet small enough that a comprehensive reference is viable: estimates of about 5MM words crop up, but even 3x could easily fit in memory on a Digital Ocean droplet, even if fully POS tagged[1]. Texts are also mostly in the public domain, and there's a lot of bilingual texts (which act as a Rosetta Stone). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Revival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Revival [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging EDIT: More than happy to talk in depth about this if anyone wants, via comments, or email on my profile.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
I need this for some vintage IBM/PC-compatible programming books that are a zillion pages long.
fernly 5y ago
Nice to provide hardware hints and designs but geez that is almost the least of it. Cleverest hardware still only gets you a thumb drive full of page images. Now what? There needs to be a software workflow ending with a readable book in PDF, EBOOK or MOBI format, and there are many, many choices to be made along that path. Edit: "Finishing a book" is discussed at a very superficial level here: https://vimeo.com/user33752051 https://vimeo.com/user33752051 at about 1:00: "In order to turn these raw images into an ebook, the very minimum you need to do is A, you need to rotate them, B you need to crop them down to use the page [?], and C you need to combine them into one document like a PDF... You can do OCR to make it searchable ... color correction... de-skewing, de-warping ..."
- walrus01 5y ago
  The simplest of which would be to turn the images into a multi page raster PDF, using freely licensed linux based command line tools for PDF generation. Which will of course result in a rather large file size vs doing OCR, but might be the best preservation method for books with illustrations, unusual fonts, catalogs, mixed text and photos, etc. I am not clear on to what extent the existing workflow does a de-skew of the camera images to deal with page curvature towards the spine. I think I recall the Internet Archive having an open source design for something similar to this? And other projects which accomplish generally the same idea.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Back in 2012, there was a guy who started an open source project that did exactly this - he wrote it specifically for the DIY Book scanner. It had a local Django project as the interface. I don't remember the details, but it did a decent job of taking the images, OCR'ing them and creating an output PDF. I believe he abandoned the project some years later as life got busy and he never found enough volunteers to help him. Would have to go through my email records to find the name of the project.
  - fernly 5y ago
    Not the same as Scan Tailor[1,2] ? Which was referenced from the Instructables link cited earlier. That apparently was a comprehensive toolkit in C++ and Qt, now archived. [1] https://scantailor.org/ https://scantailor.org/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210304015939/https://github.com/scantailor/scantailor https://web.archive.org/web/20210304015939/https://github.co...
zwayhowder 5y ago
I built one of these out of pine 2x4s and plywood. I thought it would be cheaper than buying one (I was wrong) but I'm also not a skilled woodworker and had to buy most of the tools. It works quite well and I digitised dozens of textbooks I'd purchased and needed to reference but couldn't carry around every day while finishing my masters. My one had 2 Nikon mirrorless cameras controlled via Pi-Scan. https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan I had a smaller toggle switch wired to the GPIO pins so I could click the scan next button without having to take my hands of the book. Once I got used to the workflow I could scan about 1000 pages per hour while watching Netflix. I replaced it with a Czur scanner that isn't as good, but is a lot smaller and is good enough for my less demanding needs now that I'm not doing a masters degree :D
- timeinput 5y ago
  The dual camera is a design choice I hadn't thought of. I've thought of scanning a couple books, and that's probably the trick for me. Though maybe I'll rotate the book and scan / rotate images separately.
  - zwayhowder 5y ago
    It let me capture the pages with the correct orientation and the cameras have a fixed focus on the Platen so it works really well. Then Scantailer can crop automagically and deal with the rest.
- SamBam 5y ago
  What was the purpose? Did the digitized books go to the public domain/your university, or something, or was it purely for personal research?
  - zwayhowder 5y ago
    Just for personal use as all the books were still in copyright and I own the paper versions, it was a (probably legal) fair use of them purely for reference while studying. I often needed to find information in the books and couldn't reasonably carry them all with me every day between work and uni.
fortran77 5y ago
I built a similar one of these from a kit that Dan Reetz made. (Technology has improved since I built mine.) I have eliminated most printed books. I had to pass a "psychological barrier" before I was able to discard the books I scanned. The last holdout was music scores, but I now use an iPad for music at the piano.
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  Thanks for buying and building a kit. I appreciated everyone who did that so much.
  - Finnotesorg 5y ago
    I also want this.
ebr4him 5y ago
The store seems to be down, any idea how much it costs?
shard 5y ago
This really needs to be redesigned for ergonomics. - Lever should have a button for capture - Display should be visible while looking down But now I see why destructive scanning (slicing the binding off and using a sheet feeding scanner) is so attractive. For any non-rare books, this is just too tedious and time consuming to go through for more than a few books.
- markvdb 5y ago
  Display should be visible indeed. Your capture triggering suggestion is not as great though. The systems that I shipped with http://diybookscanner.eu http://diybookscanner.eu actually used a USB foot pedal for triggering the cameras. That's by far a superior user experience to pressing a button while both hands are busy moving a cradle... Destructive scanning feels incredibly cruel to the books. A non-destructive system like this actually works fairly well. You can expect to get up to about 1000-1200 pages an hour with it.
  - shard 5y ago
    > Destructive scanning feels incredibly cruel to the books. I suppose it depends on whether it has sentimental value. When I was young, I'd treat my books like treasures, putting covers on them (even paperbacks), making sure I didn't crease the spine when I read them. Now I consider books to be a temporary store of knowledge as the contents pass to my brain. I fold pages, underline, scribble notes in them. There are thousands more copies out there, I don't feel any need to baby my copy.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  > For any non-rare books, this is just too tedious and time consuming to go through for more than a few books. If your goal is to scan a whole bunch, it's tedious. If you want to do it once in a while, it's not really a problem.
tunesmith 5y ago
Are any of you part of book scanner clubs that might have a database of word counts of famous fiction books? I've found several lists online but it's not a wide selection of books - I'd imagine book scanners might have more. I'd be happy to share the database I've cobbled together.
- userbinator 5y ago
  I briefly participated in an eBookz scene group at the turn of the century, although we didn't keep track of any word counts (nor did we OCR) and we focused on non-fiction, mainly automotive repair manuals. I doubt it's a statistic that the scanners (people/groups) pay attention to.
ngold 5y ago
I have most of the entire collection of hardback national geographics from 1930 to 1970. Wonder how legal it would be to scan them. Always wondered.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  It's just as legal as ripping your CDs into MP3s.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago
  > from 1930 Good news: It's very likely that the copyright has expired. If you were to scan them, remember to upload them to archive.org for everyone else to see. Bad news: It's only the case if the copyright hasn't been renewed by the owner. Usually most owners don't renew them, but to determine whether or not this is the case, you need to go through huge catalogs of registered entries from the U.S. copyright office.
  - WorshipTheState 5y ago
    Copyright is life of author + 70 years. No renewal necessary. Is that not true? EDIT: No, guess it's not always true. That's only for post 1978. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
  - ahi 5y ago
    Incorrect. It is almost certainly still in copyright in the United States. Anything published after 1925 will be in copyright except for those published without notice 1926-1977 or were not renewed 1926-1963. The exceptions almost certainly don't apply to NatGeo. Scanning typically falls under fair use, so copyright only applies to distribution of the scans. edit: Maybe you edited or maybe I'm just dumb. Anyway, the problem with relying on a lack of renewal is that you have to prove a negative. NYPL among others have been doing interesting work on this problem: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/09/01/historical-copyright-records-transparency https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/09/01/historical-copyright-re...
subpar 5y ago
My first job out of college was scanning books for the Internet Archive down in the basement of the Library of Congress. Their scanning machines used a foot pedal to raise and lower the glass Platen, so I'd use one hand to flip the page and wiggle the cradle to get things nice and flat and the other would snap the photo. You can get pretty fast after a while, but boy is it mindless. Older books that had been rebound a couple times already were the hardest to work with as you have the least amount of margin. There's a bunch of different sized dowels that we would put under the spine in the cradle so the glass could gain a couple millimeters of margin, just enough to avoid cutting off text. Worst case scenario the book had to be unbound in order to capture. I did get to flip through a lot of cool old illustrated catalogues like this: https://archive.org/details/illustratedcatal00keil/page/14/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/illustratedcatal00keil/page/14/m...
- raybb 5y ago
  Wow that's awesome! I take it you're responsible for a chunk of the books available now on openlibrary.org? When scanning books like that did you ever see anything interesting or are you so zoned out you don't really pay attention?
  - subpar 5y ago
    A very small chunk, I only lasted a couple months. Most of it was pretty boring, think volume after volume of copyright records or issues of the national stamp collector's magazine. Eventually I started working on some of the contract work they did for other agencies, e.g. declassified FBI case reports. The best was the stuff for the Smithsonian, which often included beautiful naturalist illustrations. I'm not sure how much of that stuff was public domain though.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Were you using gloves or something like that?
  - david_allison 5y ago
    Unsure about IA, but gloves are typically advised against[0] unless you have a suspicion that the book will be dangerous (arsenic ink in bindings[1], dust, mold or frass (sadly)[2]). Hand-washing before is typical advice but YMMV [0] https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/why-wearing-gloves-puts-books-at-risk https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/why-wearing-gloves... [1] https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/ https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/ [2] https://www.ifla.org/node/93094 https://www.ifla.org/node/93094
dang 5y ago
One past thread, a long time ago: DIY book scanning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991897 - Dec 2009 (7 comments)
ggm 5y ago
UCL-CS had one of these which was deployed in conjunction with the British Library. This is when high pixel count CCDs were super expensive back in the 1980s. Amazing device.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Hello if anyone is in the Bay Area and has a book scanner I’d love to scan my copy of this book which was only printed in India in 2001 and seems relatively rare: https://www.abebooks.com/9780140298246/Patents-Myths-Reality-Shiva-Vandana-014029824X/plp https://www.abebooks.com/9780140298246/Patents-Myths-Reality... I did fill out the form for the internet archive but it talked about scanning a library and I’m not sure they want to deal with just one book.
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  NoiseBridge maintained a DIY Book Scanner for a long time.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    Oooh good tip thank you
usui 5y ago
These kinds of discussions need more real examples to accurately depict the tradeoffs of destructive vs non-destructive scanning, so I'll add scans I personally made. Here are two pages from Cracking the Coding Interview, 6th Edition, that I preferred over the digital versions I found online that were hard on the eyes because I disliked the black-and-white scans. Feel free to ask me about "details" in the process https://imgur.com/2ZQFZ5p https://imgur.com/2ZQFZ5p It's entirely possible to accomplish post-processing without writing code if you have Adobe Photoshop. I used a free-to-the-public bookscanner built by the Digital Archivists at Noisebridge in San Francisco to take pictures of all pages in my textbooks (it took a while). In Photoshop, you can record a macro to automatically crop to a rectangular region determined by just one or more points that are guaranteed to be on the page in every photo. The selection is made by the quick selection tool (selects similar pixels to the page color in the same region). With this macro recorded, you can run it in bulk through all files. The textbook size was still large digitally (a gigabyte) because I wanted the highest quality possible for studying, but it beat having to carry heavy textbooks for sure. I also shared these files with friends and we were able to study without any physical textbooks for books that were not available digitally—it was amazing. Personally I avoided all the deskewing technologies and preferred just pictures, all in color, as close to the real thing as possible, because Noisebridge's scanner used two DSLRs and the pictures were high quality. It was better than converting everything to black-and-white for reading enjoyability. OCR through ABBYY FineReader. Overall it gets more annoying the thicker the textbook is. If destructive scanning is acceptable, one can just buy the book, go to FedEx and ask them cut the spine off for $4 to convert it to loose-leaf, then run it through a document scanner such as ScanSnap ix500, which is much faster at around 25 pages/min at its slowest One really cool feature about Noisebridge's scanner (picture below) was that you could view the camera's viewfinder live in real-time, thereby speeding up iteration and catching errors much faster https://imgur.com/4Pkdp1j https://imgur.com/4Pkdp1j
flakiness 5y ago
At Japan in the meantime, people in book scanning community (that exists) often just cut the book spine and scan the pages using normal scanner, throw it away once all the pages are scanned. People (rightly) value room spaces than books there. It's called "Ji-sui" (scanning by oneself) and gear recommendation sites like [1] are abundant. Another reason of "Ji-sui" prevalence was the poor availability of ebooks, although that reason was less relevant today. [1] http://monomania.sblo.jp/article/60578693.html http://monomania.sblo.jp/article/60578693.html
- wpietri 5y ago
  One business I kinda want to exist is a book warehouse/scanning operation. I send them boxes of books; they give me an app with access to digital versions of every book I send them. The whole operation is somewhere in, say, Nebraska, so storage cost is very low.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - flakiness 5y ago
    Similar scanning services exist in Japan as well (ex. [1]). The difference is that they kindly discard the books for you once getting scanned! [1] https://www.bookscan.co.jp/ https://www.bookscan.co.jp/
  - SolonIslandus 5y ago
    Something like this? https://1dollarscan.com/sp/ https://1dollarscan.com/sp/
    - wintermutestwin 5y ago
      $.01 per page and they are based in Fremont, CA. This looks like a cheaper way to get most ebooks and you can ship the books direct from Amazon. If enough people did this, maybe ebook pricing will come down to something rational.
braincode 5y ago
I'd love to see something like this made out of entirely recycled phones and their cameras instead of going with discrete components... any leads?
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  I've just built a basic basic overhead 'rostrum' type rig using some wood, screws, and an older Android phone. The phone's camera points down at a height of about 20cm/8" and can see an area on the base plate big enough for the object I'm capturing (in this case, 3.5" floppy disks). I use an app called IP Camera (it's on the Play store for free) to serve the image via http. I then remotely grab it, process/crop it and store it. The project is in it's early stages, but is working quite well so far.
dahart 5y ago
> While there are some computer algorithms that can help dewarp the pages after capture, it is always more reliable to just capture flat pages in the first place. I’m sure this is technically true, but curious how much it matters in practice today? Reading Google’s book scanning patents I found a description of a de-warper based on capturing a 3d depth scan of the book, which I assumed they were using in order to achieve the scale of scanning all books on earth. Capturing and de-warping a 3d depth scan would also be leagues more reliable than trying to do a purely 2d image based de-warp. > The lights must also be positioned to minimize glare and reflections. For my personal photo scanning and archiving project, I used a polarizing filter on the light and on the camera in order to eliminate specular glare, it works amazingly well. Would that be impractical, and/or not work as well on books for some reason?
_virtu 5y ago
When I was in college the iPad had just come out. I was determined to save money so I snagged an iPad to use as my omnitextbook and built a scanner based upon one of the schematics on this site with a friend. I would usually be the guy that made an email group for everyone to share notes and questions for classes pre all of the blackboard garbage, so I started leveraging those connections and would ask if anyone would let me borrow their book for a scanned version in return. My friends and I would have a book scanning party and would help to scan each others’ books. We’d grab some drinks, find some favorite albums and hang out all night until the wee hours taking turns scanning texts. After one semester the setup paid for itself. I would supplement some texts with learning trackers like bitme before amazing resources came around like libgen. Good times.
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story, I'm so glad to hear it was useful to you and your crew. Were you ever active on the forums?
Gedxx 5y ago
Here a homemade way to digitize a book with a compact camera https://www.ikkaro.com/en/como-digitalizar-libro/ https://www.ikkaro.com/en/como-digitalizar-libro/
azureel 5y ago
For anyone interested, there is also https://libreflip.org/ https://libreflip.org/ website about similar device.
timonoko 5y ago
If you have fast flatbed scanner, you can scan 300 pages in thirty minutes. Not worth the effort to build automation. Bigger problem was to sort out all errors and missed pages afterwards. Real-time display (from Imagemaqick) solved this problem: while true ; do for x in *.pnm ; do killall display display -rotate 90 $x & done sleep 5 done
- timonoko 5y ago
  Nobody asked, but for the record, this is how make real one-page PDF from two-page scans. (gm = GraphicsMagick) mkdir kaksi rm kaksi/* j=102 scale=600 size=500x730 yla=27 for x in *.pnm ; do echo $x gm convert $x -rotate 90 -crop $size+20+$yla -resize $scale -normalize kaksi/k$j.jpg j=$((j+2)) done j=103 for x in *.pnm ; do echo $x gm convert $x -rotate 90 -crop $size+530+$yla -resize $scale -normalize kaksi/k$j.jpg j=$((j+2)) done cd kaksi gm convert *.jpg -format pdf TheBook.pdf
- pflanze 5y ago
  If I read this right then it means "every 5 second, open the last scanned page (and nothing else / close the previous one)". But this seems like an inefficient way to do it, opening and killing all irrelevant pages all the time. This will be more efficient and react more quickly: lastfile= while true; do newestfile=$(ls *.pnm | tail -1) if [ "$newestfile" != "$lastfile" ]; then kill % display -rotate 90 "$newestfile" & lastfile=$newestfile fi sleep 0.3 done
  - timonoko 5y ago
    "Saving precious bits like it is 1969". This would make an excellent song title.
    - pflanze 5y ago
      Sorry but I find your answer disappointing and crossing over into offending. I spent some time first trying to understand how your code makes sense, then to write up a better solution and posted it, and you don't seem to be thankful at all and are instead dissing my effort. Sure, if it works for you, fine, I was under the impression that you didn't know better. You could have saved me time by indicating that you know your solution is hacky but you don't care.
indiantinker 5y ago
Nice! A foot-pedal can improve his over-all efficiency and reduce lower back and neck pain.
fiftyacorn 5y ago
I remember reading about Larry Page spending time developing a book scanner using a scanner and a hoover to turn pages
jbergens 5y ago
The link http://store.diybookscanner.org/ http://store.diybookscanner.org/ goes to a shop page that is not configured yet.
nanna 5y ago
Anyone have thoughts on the Easy Book Scanner design by David Landin? https://www.instructables.com/Book-Scanner-Low-cost-easy-to-make-1000-pages-an-h/ https://www.instructables.com/Book-Scanner-Low-cost-easy-to-...
- hackeyed 5y ago
  Looks incredibly serviceable and well engineered. I would expect reasonable and consistent results from the rig. The biggest question would come down to the cameras. With these kind of rigs (two cameras, not computer controlled, no computer display) your big potential sources of error are either accidentally failing to trigger one camera or cameras losing focus on the page (especially if you are at something like the end of a chapter where there is often empty space in the middle of the page where the camera's auto-focus area is). His solution of using the IR remote should significantly reduce the issue of failing to capture on one camera. Cameras exist with manual focus settings, but they are often pricier or too old to reliably find one worth recommending to others. The CHDK alternative firmware for certain cheap Canon cameras generally adds a manual focus option for the less expensive cameras (though the individual features depend on who is making the firmware build you get). Another option worth investigating is the newest Raspberry Pi camera modules with external lenses. Those should give you manual focus and the ability to build up an automated workflow you like around things like moving files around and any pre-processing you need. An ~9 mega pixel camera gets you 300dpi resolution on a full sheet of A4 paper, which is a lot more than most books.
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  A lot of people on the DIY Book Scanner forums got a lot of value out of this design and David's presence on the forum. In my opinion it's an excellent starting point.
mcguire 5y ago
Are the kits back in stock? I fooled around with the DIY option, but realized I was incompetent. Ended up buying a cheap Czur scanner, which works surprisingly well. For it, you hold the book open on the black mat on a table. The scanner uses a laser to measure and correct page curvature, and takes a picture of both pages. It produces decent PDFs (I'm not sure about the comparative resolution) with (bad) OCR'ed text. (The IA re-OCR's the book after upload, right?)

340 points by bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago

Here it is in action: http://tenrec.builders/quill/guide/scanning/scan/ http://tenrec.builders/quill/guide/scanning/scan/

totetsu 5y ago

Last year I bought a czur book scanner that looks kind of like a lamp to try and archive some 100 year old books I had limited access to. The resolution of the camera was so low I ended up balancing my phone on top and getting better images just using it as a light.

ghaff 5y ago
I find the latest Czur works well enough for non-glossy stuff. The broader scanning problem I find is that, beyond the small must scan category, I find I have so much stuff that generally it's not very practical.

Topgamer7 5y ago

I remember reading about Google's book scanner that operated automatically using vacuum pressure to gently flip pages. I'd love to see an open source variety of that.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
I think about Google's scanner project a lot. I wonder if they are still scanning? I would love if they found a way to offer those books (authors would have to agree) to the world. If they did, I would forgive them for tracking me all these years. I'd even put up with ads in the books.
- david_allison 5y ago
  They do if the books are out of copyright, and they're often copied to archive.org (and then transcribed via Wikisource) when this happens. sample: https://books.google.im/books?id=Me8CAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.im/books?id=Me8CAAAAQAAJ&printsec=front...
  - floathub 5y ago
    And you can order a bound paperback book made from the scans of just about any out-of-copyright google book. From the Harvard Bookstore (or anyone else that has an Espresso Book Machine): https://www.ondemandbooks.com/as/?t=Hamlet&c=google https://www.ondemandbooks.com/as/?t=Hamlet&c=google
supernova87a 5y ago
I don't know where to find a picture of it, but I remember seeing a video of one of their book scanners. Or maybe it was just one version of them. Picture a wedge (shaped like the V of a book lying open on a table) that could move up and down. The wedge would descend and insert itself into the V of the book's pages, then rising up would suck the 2 left and right sheets against the sides of the wedge, scanning as it went. Then it would blow those 2 pages to the left (or right I forget) and descend again and do the next set. I thought it was pretty cool. Have never seen something like it since.
markvdb 5y ago
Automated page turning is an incredibly complex problem to tackle. It won't gain you as much as you'd think either. "Book" and "page" are a surprisingly difficult to define categories. If my experience helping to build the diybookscanner.org project taught me anything, it's that picking the low hanging fruit of small efficiency improvements to the (semi-)manual process is so much more effective...
- donalhunt 5y ago
  Which is probably why some of the scanning locations used something very similar to this DIY effort (I'm familiar with the Oxford, UK location that existed in the mid 00s). Humans turned the pages with the finger tips mentioned in another comment.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Google Linear Book Scanner https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MNqINDm1lk https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MNqINDm1lk
- rckoepke 5y ago
  See also: https://linearbookscanner.org/ https://linearbookscanner.org/

Topgamer7 5y ago

I've used scan tailor in the past to convert a outboard motor manual to pdf, it's pretty powerful. I didn't have a proper setup, but my results still came out decently. https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced

david_allison 5y ago

I'm very interested in getting into archival (getting started this month after a few more conversations). Your buy button[0] is broken. You're potentially missing out on a few sales due to this. Is 2x 4GB SD card sufficient for your purposes? I've been quoted 50MB TIFF images as a standard, and a lot of books wouldn't fit without swapping SDs at that size. [0] http://store.diybookscanner.org/ http://store.diybookscanner.org/

zwayhowder 5y ago
If you use pi-scan the images are saved to a USB drive instead of the SDcards.
fernly 5y ago
archiving what? just curious.
- david_allison 5y ago
  I want to digitize the entire linguistic and spoken corpus of a critically endangered language[0] and convert it to a searchable format to aid in language revival, academic research, and ensuring that an informed debate can occur when the modern usages of the language differ from traditional usages of the language. Most of the printed books are scattered, but available, but it's akin to an iceberg: there's a significant amount of 'submerged' knowledge about the language in written manuscripts and recorded audio, and this is where a lot of the value comes from. Printed texts are primarily religious, and getting the colloquial usages of words and phrases is very useful. Many manuscripts aren't digitized at all, or are available and need transcription. The language is relatively well-recorded (dating back to at least the late 16th century in written form), and yet small enough that a comprehensive reference is viable: estimates of about 5MM words crop up, but even 3x could easily fit in memory on a Digital Ocean droplet, even if fully POS tagged[1]. Texts are also mostly in the public domain, and there's a lot of bilingual texts (which act as a Rosetta Stone). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Revival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Revival [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging EDIT: More than happy to talk in depth about this if anyone wants, via comments, or email on my profile.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

I need this for some vintage IBM/PC-compatible programming books that are a zillion pages long.

fernly 5y ago

Nice to provide hardware hints and designs but geez that is almost the least of it. Cleverest hardware still only gets you a thumb drive full of page images. Now what? There needs to be a software workflow ending with a readable book in PDF, EBOOK or MOBI format, and there are many, many choices to be made along that path. Edit: "Finishing a book" is discussed at a very superficial level here: https://vimeo.com/user33752051 https://vimeo.com/user33752051 at about 1:00: "In order to turn these raw images into an ebook, the very minimum you need to do is A, you need to rotate them, B you need to crop them down to use the page [?], and C you need to combine them into one document like a PDF... You can do OCR to make it searchable ... color correction... de-skewing, de-warping ..."

walrus01 5y ago
The simplest of which would be to turn the images into a multi page raster PDF, using freely licensed linux based command line tools for PDF generation. Which will of course result in a rather large file size vs doing OCR, but might be the best preservation method for books with illustrations, unusual fonts, catalogs, mixed text and photos, etc. I am not clear on to what extent the existing workflow does a de-skew of the camera images to deal with page curvature towards the spine. I think I recall the Internet Archive having an open source design for something similar to this? And other projects which accomplish generally the same idea.
BeetleB 5y ago
Back in 2012, there was a guy who started an open source project that did exactly this - he wrote it specifically for the DIY Book scanner. It had a local Django project as the interface. I don't remember the details, but it did a decent job of taking the images, OCR'ing them and creating an output PDF. I believe he abandoned the project some years later as life got busy and he never found enough volunteers to help him. Would have to go through my email records to find the name of the project.
- fernly 5y ago
  Not the same as Scan Tailor[1,2] ? Which was referenced from the Instructables link cited earlier. That apparently was a comprehensive toolkit in C++ and Qt, now archived. [1] https://scantailor.org/ https://scantailor.org/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210304015939/https://github.com/scantailor/scantailor https://web.archive.org/web/20210304015939/https://github.co...

zwayhowder 5y ago

I built one of these out of pine 2x4s and plywood. I thought it would be cheaper than buying one (I was wrong) but I'm also not a skilled woodworker and had to buy most of the tools. It works quite well and I digitised dozens of textbooks I'd purchased and needed to reference but couldn't carry around every day while finishing my masters. My one had 2 Nikon mirrorless cameras controlled via Pi-Scan. https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan I had a smaller toggle switch wired to the GPIO pins so I could click the scan next button without having to take my hands of the book. Once I got used to the workflow I could scan about 1000 pages per hour while watching Netflix. I replaced it with a Czur scanner that isn't as good, but is a lot smaller and is good enough for my less demanding needs now that I'm not doing a masters degree :D

timeinput 5y ago
The dual camera is a design choice I hadn't thought of. I've thought of scanning a couple books, and that's probably the trick for me. Though maybe I'll rotate the book and scan / rotate images separately.
- zwayhowder 5y ago
  It let me capture the pages with the correct orientation and the cameras have a fixed focus on the Platen so it works really well. Then Scantailer can crop automagically and deal with the rest.
SamBam 5y ago
What was the purpose? Did the digitized books go to the public domain/your university, or something, or was it purely for personal research?
- zwayhowder 5y ago
  Just for personal use as all the books were still in copyright and I own the paper versions, it was a (probably legal) fair use of them purely for reference while studying. I often needed to find information in the books and couldn't reasonably carry them all with me every day between work and uni.

fortran77 5y ago

I built a similar one of these from a kit that Dan Reetz made. (Technology has improved since I built mine.) I have eliminated most printed books. I had to pass a "psychological barrier" before I was able to discard the books I scanned. The last holdout was music scores, but I now use an iPad for music at the piano.

daniel_reetz 5y ago
Thanks for buying and building a kit. I appreciated everyone who did that so much.
- Finnotesorg 5y ago
  I also want this.

ebr4him 5y ago

The store seems to be down, any idea how much it costs?

shard 5y ago

This really needs to be redesigned for ergonomics. - Lever should have a button for capture - Display should be visible while looking down But now I see why destructive scanning (slicing the binding off and using a sheet feeding scanner) is so attractive. For any non-rare books, this is just too tedious and time consuming to go through for more than a few books.

markvdb 5y ago
Display should be visible indeed. Your capture triggering suggestion is not as great though. The systems that I shipped with http://diybookscanner.eu http://diybookscanner.eu actually used a USB foot pedal for triggering the cameras. That's by far a superior user experience to pressing a button while both hands are busy moving a cradle... Destructive scanning feels incredibly cruel to the books. A non-destructive system like this actually works fairly well. You can expect to get up to about 1000-1200 pages an hour with it.
- shard 5y ago
  > Destructive scanning feels incredibly cruel to the books. I suppose it depends on whether it has sentimental value. When I was young, I'd treat my books like treasures, putting covers on them (even paperbacks), making sure I didn't crease the spine when I read them. Now I consider books to be a temporary store of knowledge as the contents pass to my brain. I fold pages, underline, scribble notes in them. There are thousands more copies out there, I don't feel any need to baby my copy.
BeetleB 5y ago
> For any non-rare books, this is just too tedious and time consuming to go through for more than a few books. If your goal is to scan a whole bunch, it's tedious. If you want to do it once in a while, it's not really a problem.

tunesmith 5y ago

Are any of you part of book scanner clubs that might have a database of word counts of famous fiction books? I've found several lists online but it's not a wide selection of books - I'd imagine book scanners might have more. I'd be happy to share the database I've cobbled together.

userbinator 5y ago
I briefly participated in an eBookz scene group at the turn of the century, although we didn't keep track of any word counts (nor did we OCR) and we focused on non-fiction, mainly automotive repair manuals. I doubt it's a statistic that the scanners (people/groups) pay attention to.

ngold 5y ago

I have most of the entire collection of hardback national geographics from 1930 to 1970. Wonder how legal it would be to scan them. Always wondered.

salamandersauce 5y ago
It's just as legal as ripping your CDs into MP3s.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago
> from 1930 Good news: It's very likely that the copyright has expired. If you were to scan them, remember to upload them to archive.org for everyone else to see. Bad news: It's only the case if the copyright hasn't been renewed by the owner. Usually most owners don't renew them, but to determine whether or not this is the case, you need to go through huge catalogs of registered entries from the U.S. copyright office.
- WorshipTheState 5y ago
  Copyright is life of author + 70 years. No renewal necessary. Is that not true? EDIT: No, guess it's not always true. That's only for post 1978. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
- ahi 5y ago
  Incorrect. It is almost certainly still in copyright in the United States. Anything published after 1925 will be in copyright except for those published without notice 1926-1977 or were not renewed 1926-1963. The exceptions almost certainly don't apply to NatGeo. Scanning typically falls under fair use, so copyright only applies to distribution of the scans. edit: Maybe you edited or maybe I'm just dumb. Anyway, the problem with relying on a lack of renewal is that you have to prove a negative. NYPL among others have been doing interesting work on this problem: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/09/01/historical-copyright-records-transparency https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/09/01/historical-copyright-re...

subpar 5y ago

My first job out of college was scanning books for the Internet Archive down in the basement of the Library of Congress. Their scanning machines used a foot pedal to raise and lower the glass Platen, so I'd use one hand to flip the page and wiggle the cradle to get things nice and flat and the other would snap the photo. You can get pretty fast after a while, but boy is it mindless. Older books that had been rebound a couple times already were the hardest to work with as you have the least amount of margin. There's a bunch of different sized dowels that we would put under the spine in the cradle so the glass could gain a couple millimeters of margin, just enough to avoid cutting off text. Worst case scenario the book had to be unbound in order to capture. I did get to flip through a lot of cool old illustrated catalogues like this: https://archive.org/details/illustratedcatal00keil/page/14/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/illustratedcatal00keil/page/14/m...

raybb 5y ago
Wow that's awesome! I take it you're responsible for a chunk of the books available now on openlibrary.org? When scanning books like that did you ever see anything interesting or are you so zoned out you don't really pay attention?
- subpar 5y ago
  A very small chunk, I only lasted a couple months. Most of it was pretty boring, think volume after volume of copyright records or issues of the national stamp collector's magazine. Eventually I started working on some of the contract work they did for other agencies, e.g. declassified FBI case reports. The best was the stuff for the Smithsonian, which often included beautiful naturalist illustrations. I'm not sure how much of that stuff was public domain though.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Were you using gloves or something like that?
- david_allison 5y ago
  Unsure about IA, but gloves are typically advised against[0] unless you have a suspicion that the book will be dangerous (arsenic ink in bindings[1], dust, mold or frass (sadly)[2]). Hand-washing before is typical advice but YMMV [0] https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/why-wearing-gloves-puts-books-at-risk https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/why-wearing-gloves... [1] https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/ https://daily.jstor.org/some-books-can-kill/ [2] https://www.ifla.org/node/93094 https://www.ifla.org/node/93094

dang 5y ago

One past thread, a long time ago: DIY book scanning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991897 - Dec 2009 (7 comments)

ggm 5y ago

UCL-CS had one of these which was deployed in conjunction with the British Library. This is when high pixel count CCDs were super expensive back in the 1980s. Amazing device.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Hello if anyone is in the Bay Area and has a book scanner I’d love to scan my copy of this book which was only printed in India in 2001 and seems relatively rare: https://www.abebooks.com/9780140298246/Patents-Myths-Reality-Shiva-Vandana-014029824X/plp https://www.abebooks.com/9780140298246/Patents-Myths-Reality... I did fill out the form for the internet archive but it talked about scanning a library and I’m not sure they want to deal with just one book.

daniel_reetz 5y ago
NoiseBridge maintained a DIY Book Scanner for a long time.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  Oooh good tip thank you

usui 5y ago

These kinds of discussions need more real examples to accurately depict the tradeoffs of destructive vs non-destructive scanning, so I'll add scans I personally made. Here are two pages from Cracking the Coding Interview, 6th Edition, that I preferred over the digital versions I found online that were hard on the eyes because I disliked the black-and-white scans. Feel free to ask me about "details" in the process https://imgur.com/2ZQFZ5p https://imgur.com/2ZQFZ5p It's entirely possible to accomplish post-processing without writing code if you have Adobe Photoshop. I used a free-to-the-public bookscanner built by the Digital Archivists at Noisebridge in San Francisco to take pictures of all pages in my textbooks (it took a while). In Photoshop, you can record a macro to automatically crop to a rectangular region determined by just one or more points that are guaranteed to be on the page in every photo. The selection is made by the quick selection tool (selects similar pixels to the page color in the same region). With this macro recorded, you can run it in bulk through all files. The textbook size was still large digitally (a gigabyte) because I wanted the highest quality possible for studying, but it beat having to carry heavy textbooks for sure. I also shared these files with friends and we were able to study without any physical textbooks for books that were not available digitally—it was amazing. Personally I avoided all the deskewing technologies and preferred just pictures, all in color, as close to the real thing as possible, because Noisebridge's scanner used two DSLRs and the pictures were high quality. It was better than converting everything to black-and-white for reading enjoyability. OCR through ABBYY FineReader. Overall it gets more annoying the thicker the textbook is. If destructive scanning is acceptable, one can just buy the book, go to FedEx and ask them cut the spine off for $4 to convert it to loose-leaf, then run it through a document scanner such as ScanSnap ix500, which is much faster at around 25 pages/min at its slowest One really cool feature about Noisebridge's scanner (picture below) was that you could view the camera's viewfinder live in real-time, thereby speeding up iteration and catching errors much faster https://imgur.com/4Pkdp1j https://imgur.com/4Pkdp1j

flakiness 5y ago

At Japan in the meantime, people in book scanning community (that exists) often just cut the book spine and scan the pages using normal scanner, throw it away once all the pages are scanned. People (rightly) value room spaces than books there. It's called "Ji-sui" (scanning by oneself) and gear recommendation sites like [1] are abundant. Another reason of "Ji-sui" prevalence was the poor availability of ebooks, although that reason was less relevant today. [1] http://monomania.sblo.jp/article/60578693.html http://monomania.sblo.jp/article/60578693.html

wpietri 5y ago
One business I kinda want to exist is a book warehouse/scanning operation. I send them boxes of books; they give me an app with access to digital versions of every book I send them. The whole operation is somewhere in, say, Nebraska, so storage cost is very low.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- flakiness 5y ago
  Similar scanning services exist in Japan as well (ex. [1]). The difference is that they kindly discard the books for you once getting scanned! [1] https://www.bookscan.co.jp/ https://www.bookscan.co.jp/
- SolonIslandus 5y ago
  Something like this? https://1dollarscan.com/sp/ https://1dollarscan.com/sp/
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    $.01 per page and they are based in Fremont, CA. This looks like a cheaper way to get most ebooks and you can ship the books direct from Amazon. If enough people did this, maybe ebook pricing will come down to something rational.

braincode 5y ago

I'd love to see something like this made out of entirely recycled phones and their cameras instead of going with discrete components... any leads?

mattowen_uk 5y ago
I've just built a basic basic overhead 'rostrum' type rig using some wood, screws, and an older Android phone. The phone's camera points down at a height of about 20cm/8" and can see an area on the base plate big enough for the object I'm capturing (in this case, 3.5" floppy disks). I use an app called IP Camera (it's on the Play store for free) to serve the image via http. I then remotely grab it, process/crop it and store it. The project is in it's early stages, but is working quite well so far.

dahart 5y ago

> While there are some computer algorithms that can help dewarp the pages after capture, it is always more reliable to just capture flat pages in the first place. I’m sure this is technically true, but curious how much it matters in practice today? Reading Google’s book scanning patents I found a description of a de-warper based on capturing a 3d depth scan of the book, which I assumed they were using in order to achieve the scale of scanning all books on earth. Capturing and de-warping a 3d depth scan would also be leagues more reliable than trying to do a purely 2d image based de-warp. > The lights must also be positioned to minimize glare and reflections. For my personal photo scanning and archiving project, I used a polarizing filter on the light and on the camera in order to eliminate specular glare, it works amazingly well. Would that be impractical, and/or not work as well on books for some reason?

_virtu 5y ago

When I was in college the iPad had just come out. I was determined to save money so I snagged an iPad to use as my omnitextbook and built a scanner based upon one of the schematics on this site with a friend. I would usually be the guy that made an email group for everyone to share notes and questions for classes pre all of the blackboard garbage, so I started leveraging those connections and would ask if anyone would let me borrow their book for a scanned version in return. My friends and I would have a book scanning party and would help to scan each others’ books. We’d grab some drinks, find some favorite albums and hang out all night until the wee hours taking turns scanning texts. After one semester the setup paid for itself. I would supplement some texts with learning trackers like bitme before amazing resources came around like libgen. Good times.

daniel_reetz 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your story, I'm so glad to hear it was useful to you and your crew. Were you ever active on the forums?

Gedxx 5y ago

Here a homemade way to digitize a book with a compact camera https://www.ikkaro.com/en/como-digitalizar-libro/ https://www.ikkaro.com/en/como-digitalizar-libro/

azureel 5y ago

For anyone interested, there is also https://libreflip.org/ https://libreflip.org/ website about similar device.

timonoko 5y ago

If you have fast flatbed scanner, you can scan 300 pages in thirty minutes. Not worth the effort to build automation. Bigger problem was to sort out all errors and missed pages afterwards. Real-time display (from Imagemaqick) solved this problem: while true ; do for x in *.pnm ; do killall display display -rotate 90 $x & done sleep 5 done

timonoko 5y ago
Nobody asked, but for the record, this is how make real one-page PDF from two-page scans. (gm = GraphicsMagick) mkdir kaksi rm kaksi/* j=102 scale=600 size=500x730 yla=27 for x in *.pnm ; do echo $x gm convert $x -rotate 90 -crop $size+20+$yla -resize $scale -normalize kaksi/k$j.jpg j=$((j+2)) done j=103 for x in *.pnm ; do echo $x gm convert $x -rotate 90 -crop $size+530+$yla -resize $scale -normalize kaksi/k$j.jpg j=$((j+2)) done cd kaksi gm convert *.jpg -format pdf TheBook.pdf
pflanze 5y ago
If I read this right then it means "every 5 second, open the last scanned page (and nothing else / close the previous one)". But this seems like an inefficient way to do it, opening and killing all irrelevant pages all the time. This will be more efficient and react more quickly: lastfile= while true; do newestfile=$(ls *.pnm | tail -1) if [ "$newestfile" != "$lastfile" ]; then kill % display -rotate 90 "$newestfile" & lastfile=$newestfile fi sleep 0.3 done
- timonoko 5y ago
  "Saving precious bits like it is 1969". This would make an excellent song title.
  - pflanze 5y ago
    Sorry but I find your answer disappointing and crossing over into offending. I spent some time first trying to understand how your code makes sense, then to write up a better solution and posted it, and you don't seem to be thankful at all and are instead dissing my effort. Sure, if it works for you, fine, I was under the impression that you didn't know better. You could have saved me time by indicating that you know your solution is hacky but you don't care.

indiantinker 5y ago

Nice! A foot-pedal can improve his over-all efficiency and reduce lower back and neck pain.

fiftyacorn 5y ago

I remember reading about Larry Page spending time developing a book scanner using a scanner and a hoover to turn pages

jbergens 5y ago

The link http://store.diybookscanner.org/ http://store.diybookscanner.org/ goes to a shop page that is not configured yet.

nanna 5y ago

Anyone have thoughts on the Easy Book Scanner design by David Landin? https://www.instructables.com/Book-Scanner-Low-cost-easy-to-make-1000-pages-an-h/ https://www.instructables.com/Book-Scanner-Low-cost-easy-to-...

hackeyed 5y ago
Looks incredibly serviceable and well engineered. I would expect reasonable and consistent results from the rig. The biggest question would come down to the cameras. With these kind of rigs (two cameras, not computer controlled, no computer display) your big potential sources of error are either accidentally failing to trigger one camera or cameras losing focus on the page (especially if you are at something like the end of a chapter where there is often empty space in the middle of the page where the camera's auto-focus area is). His solution of using the IR remote should significantly reduce the issue of failing to capture on one camera. Cameras exist with manual focus settings, but they are often pricier or too old to reliably find one worth recommending to others. The CHDK alternative firmware for certain cheap Canon cameras generally adds a manual focus option for the less expensive cameras (though the individual features depend on who is making the firmware build you get). Another option worth investigating is the newest Raspberry Pi camera modules with external lenses. Those should give you manual focus and the ability to build up an automated workflow you like around things like moving files around and any pre-processing you need. An ~9 mega pixel camera gets you 300dpi resolution on a full sheet of A4 paper, which is a lot more than most books.
daniel_reetz 5y ago
A lot of people on the DIY Book Scanner forums got a lot of value out of this design and David's presence on the forum. In my opinion it's an excellent starting point.

mcguire 5y ago

Are the kits back in stock? I fooled around with the DIY option, but realized I was incompetent. Ended up buying a cheap Czur scanner, which works surprisingly well. For it, you hold the book open on the black mat on a table. The scanner uses a laser to measure and correct page curvature, and takes a picture of both pages. It produces decent PDFs (I'm not sure about the comparative resolution) with (bad) OCR'ed text. (The IA re-OCR's the book after upload, right?)