How to Digitize a Book

This quick 5-minute tutorial shows you how to take your old books and scan them into a computer so that they can be searched and viewed in your computer or ebook reader.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• digitization
• scanning
• books
• howto
• kindle
• reader
• ebooks

[mjt1517]

You don't have to slice and dice your books. Look up DIY book scanning. You just need to photograph the pages and OCR them.

[cayblood]

@mjt1517 I've seen many of the DIY scanning systems that people have made. They are quite cool. But the amount of work required to get a completely automated system is intense. Orders of magnitude more work than what I've done here. Another alternative is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a professional non-destructive scanning system like Google uses. Also way out of reach. All non-destructive scanners take WAY longer than this method too. That is why I chose this way.

[ontopofthe7thhill]

Okay, between 1:58 and 2:00 I see two orbs moving in a horizontal direction, independently from one another and the environment around. Look for them in the video, they're just above the book, but far in the distance, close to the wall.

[cayblood]

@ontopofthe7thhill Wow, never thought I would see conspiracy theories about a dry tutorial like this! :-) Just kidding. Anyhow, I think those are probably artifacts from the video compression. They occur very close to the edge of the book, so it's very possible they are just some side-effects from the algorithm being used to reduce how much information must be sent for each frame of video. Compression codecs attempt to remove unnecessary visual info but there is always a tradeoff involved.

[Florenceho]

Don't need to re-film. Just add the warning words at the video introduction.

[cayblood]

@Florenceho Or better yet just read my comment on the video. It's really not a big deal.

[Crowderkyle1111]

Hey would you convert a book for me

[mjt1517]

I can appreciate that, if you have no problem sacrificing the book. There are some very old books at my local seminary library that I want to digitize, though, so I'm gonna have to build my own rig.

[sdje348]

@Myfrogsnameisbob hey, i meant that home depot reps can "bandsaw" the binding of the text book, and have the pages separated (as I do not have any wood working equipment).

[Myfrogsnameisbob]

@sdje348 Home Depot digitizes books?

[churchbigbang]

Dude! you are bare feet! Isn't that dangerous?

[mivey64]

Thanks for the great tutorial. I have Adobe Acrobat and never realized I could digitize my old genealogy books with it. Such a great tool for searching information quickly.

[silllyniecy]

Now this, is useful. Thank you!