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Comment by rychco | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea, although the risk of torn pages is mildly concerning for archival purposes or valuable books. Though if that were the case, I'm sure scanning by hand would be preferred anyway. I've often wanted a device like this for the purpose of digitizing my excessively large collection of books.

Regarding frequency of torn pages in the FAQ:

> Prototype 1 could scan the majority of books without damage, but may tear one or two pages in some books. Out of 50 books tested, 45% had one or two of their pages either torn or folded. This is a very early prototype and there are many areas for improvement in the design.

In my opinion, this is mostly acceptable. Especially if a future revision reduces the 45% to somewhere around the ~10-20% range. If I had the space for a device like this, I would definitely consider building one.

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For a while, the Internet Archive built a book scanner that rests the book in a V-shaped cradle. A volunteer turns pages by hand and lowers/raises a pair of glass panes that gently press the pages for imaging by a pair of DSLR cameras on an angled mount. The whole assembly isn’t automatic, but can be easily operated by hand.

https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sc...

You said "for a while"; are they not using these machines anymore?

I imagine lawsuits like this[0] caused them to slow down unfortunately.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....

I'm not sure if one of those machines was the cause, but I've seen far too many old books on archive.org which have pages that appear to have been torn by the scanner; thus I doubt they're manually doing it.

Interestingly the Internet Archive copied the open source design (of their scanner) from the site https://diybookscanner.org/ ( as they are allowed to by its open source licence ) The internet Archive then effectively refused to release any details back to the community. After a lot of “pushing”, the Internet Archive did acknowledge the source their design was based on came from the site bookscanner.org. This would have been very disappointing, in my opinion for the designer of the scanner – who released the info open source. At one time Internet Archive sold this scanner to organizations for $10K I think the price has dropped now ( I think ) to a few thousand.

If you haven’t already seen this site, it’s well worth a visit:

https://www.diybookscanner.org/en/intro.html

I made the cardboard scanner many years ago both to scan whole books as well as sections of books from the library. It worked pretty well but nowadays in practice I usually look into the open library at the Internet archive first. Hope it sticks around.

Great link, thanks!

> In my opinion, this is mostly acceptable.

Not if the book is irreplaceable, e.g. old and out of print. No torn pages are acceptable.

And before computers, there was no electronic copy.

Ah yes I should have said something more like “in my usecase”, which is just to digitize ordinary texts that are still in print but that occupy too much space in my home to justify keeping!

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