814
At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book—one page at a time, by hand.
(files.catbox.moe)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
814 points (99.0% liked)
Mildly Interesting
17566 readers
87 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wow that seems painfully slow/tedious. Why isn't it automatized? I think I saw a robot do like 20 pages a second on a yt some years ago.
Do you remember the results of those speed scans? Crooked pages, parts of the document cut off, blurry scans, etc.
It was a lazy method that resulted in a lot of junk data.
I think this is what I saw. Not quite 20 pages/s hahah and also a different method.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Google have digitised a lot of books using some more advanced tech, though they started out with something a little like this.
What happened to that in the end? I heard they wanted to digitize the worlds books and then it just petered out at some point and heard nothing about it. Did they continue or was it spun to Internet Archive to do?
My understanding is the project led into Google Books. Google fought many legal cases and ultimately won but their enthusiasm to scan more books seems to have waned. Google basically convinced judges that by only letting people see a few pages, it fell under fair use, but then that meant you didn't get a giant library because you couldn't read the whole book.
There's an article about it here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-of-university-library-books
Also see https://www.hathitrust.org/about/ which is mentioned in the article.
That would be interesting to see!
This is probably the method that gives you the best quality (deskewing, lighting) without cutting the back of the book and feeding it into a scanner. (AFAIK)
I saw a book scanner similar to this one that used a vacuum to turn pages but otherwise same principle.