DIY Book Scanner

For best results from my bookscanner, I started using the DjVu format, which is designed for scanned books. I've collected a lot of useful information, so I decided to publish that as a small info website, in Hungarian: www.djvu.hu

Exisitng editors for text data DjVu files are quite limited, like for example DjVuSmooth. So I've implemented a new editor in JavaScript, that allows editing both the strucutre of the text (paragraphs, lines, words,...) and the coordinates of the text boxes by simply dragging with the mouse, features like create, delete, merge are also available.

There are many challenges with my DIY bookscanner. I plan to document them sometime... The biggest modification was to replace the plexi glass with the top part of a scanner, because the plexi was very much scratched after a few books. Spreading the light with a semi-transparent cover near to the lamp was also necessary.

Most annoying of all problems was the barrel distortion of the camera.  This made the whole equipment no competition to the flatbed scans of old books that are already scanned, that I also plan to scan to improve quality.

Hungarian version of this article is available on djvu.hu

To explain this book scanner idea in a few words, compared to traditional flatbed scanners or special flatbed book scanners:

• 90 degree holder plate for the book
• no need to push the book
• no need to disassemble the book
• built from cheap leftover material
• scanning with a compact photo camera
• no wait for a flatbed scanner to move across a page slooooooooowly

There is an excellent community for building home made book scanners. By following the guides on diybookscanner.org it's easy to build your own scanner, that can scan a 300 pages book in 30 minutes. After 1.5 hours postprocessing work (in ScanTailor) you'll have very good black & white TIF images, that are straight, cleaned from noise, well readable. (No OCR or single-file conversion is included in this time frame.)