Physical book scanning is a challenging topic on it’s own. I needed to ask around and do my homework, and stay focused on the time-consuming task at hand!

This is a followup to my previous post on Book Scanning, where I started with a cheap little flatbed scanner. Now I’m going to focus on Speed, and go over what I’ve learned about Fully-Automated scanning solutions.

Don’t get too exited about this post, none of these results are practical- but all of it interesting and worth mention- I’d simply be a fool not to at least explore every possibility at this stage…

Brewster Kahle: A digital library, free to the world (Archive.org founder)

Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library — every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history … It’s all free to the public — unless someone else gets to it first.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/brewster_kahle.html

A key element to my approach, is to separate the scanner software from the scanner, as much as possible. I’m not approaching this in a new way, I’m a Unix hacker.
Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix tradition, summarized the philosophy as follows:
“This is the Unix [...]

What is the Distributed Proofreaders project? (The driving force behind Project Gutenberg!)
There are many growing information archives available on the internet, but with regard to Book content, Project Gutenberg (PG) is the granddaddy of them all. Founded in 1971, Project Gutenberg seems to be the oldest Digital Library project in existence- deserving of the [...]

I’ve got a media pack-rat problem. I admit it. It comes in handy, but I seriously do have floppy disks with genuine Photoshop 1.0 for a Mac. Somewhere.
That’s the problem. Data doesn’t take much space, I live in a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in NYC- but at this point I have [...]

I spent a few years with the majority of my books in boxes, and lived off my harddrives. Not only did I get very comfortable reading works on-screen, but I became addicted to how malleable the digitized content is. A simple text search is an astoundingly powerful thing. My books eventually came out of [...]

NY Times, May 14, 2006 Scan This Book! By KEVIN KELLY
This article really interests me, as I begin to froth at the mouth… Briefly it shows that other people REALLY want some of the same things I want- (I feel less crazy when people ask me why I’m scanning, now that the NY [...]

Well, I’ve finally flipped over to my own server for this blog of notes.
I moved off of the Blogger system, 3 reasons:
1) My future posts are highly critical of Google Books, (critical technically, socially, and from a business strategy perspective). Google owns Blogger.  This could become an awkward relationship as I begin to rely on, [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here… and I’ve covered a lot of ground in the meantime.

A quick note to readers who may stumble into this site: as it will take years to digitize my personal library, I don’t intend to post regular updates here.
Here’s a run-down of things I’ve done in the [...]

Brewster Kahle: A digital library, free to the world (Archive.org founder)

Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library — every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history … It’s all free to the public — unless someone else gets to it first.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/brewster_kahle.html