Thanks Don, I suppose I could have done the research to find that out myself, but it never occurred to me to do so. What you say shows that the concept is by now very routine. Hardly surprising; in university librares and even surreptitiously in bookshops, energetic anti-Luddites are busy snapping away at books and articles.

Gardner,
Thanks for the URL.Many of the devices it illustrates certainly are impressive, but all demand more elaborate mechanisms than I have hitherto so much as considered. I am not saying that this disqualifies them from reasonable consideration, and certainly if I am working in poor light it is necessary to scrounge a reading light, but so far I have managed acceptably with a hand-held camera for a few pages at a time for corrections or bits of newsprint etc, and the mutilated polystyrene table for a stand. I have occasionally used a tripod, which can be more suitable for some purposes. Another trick that is useful for more portable requirements is to se a stick such as a walking stick as a means of steadying the camera, a sort of monopodal tripod. It enables one to keep the camera steady enough for most purposes, plus controlling the distance well enough to use manual focus, which conserves battery power, gives more consistent results and increases speed.
If I had to do it again, I probably would have chosen something longer; my little table is only 40 cm high, and 60-80 cm would give less distortion and more even focus. It is no problem for little paperbacks, but large pages are not so good, so I have to work out something to raise the level. I haven't done much scanning lately, but soon I may consider carving up an inverted dustbin or something if I can't find a higher small table.
One thing I have not yet found is anything that I can use as a non-reflective overlay to flatten the pages without degrading the image or causing reflections. Picture glass doesn't work, unless there is a new grade that I don't know of.
Something I have not yet got round to obtaining or jury-rigging, is one of those nice little cable-attached plungers, or better, a foot pedal for taking the snaps. After a few hundred pages, groping for the button is a nuisance.

Sparr,
>I have a few hundred thousand pages to scan, so a diy camera-style book scanner isn't appropriate, nor is a flatbed scanner. Thanks for the ideas, though.<

You are welcome. I did wonder. Then I assume that you are using a mechanical feed scanner. If so it is simply a matter of guillotining or otherwise amputating the gluey bits.
Someone once said something like: "If you can neither avoid it nor fix it, don't worry about it; it isn't a problem; it's reality."
Or as they said long ago, "What can't be cured must be endured."
Now, I don't know your circumstances, so everything I say is highly context sensitive, and please don't bite me if I tell you obviosities that have nothing to do with your needs and constraints (not to mention tastes, as Gardner instanced.) BUT if the material cannot reasonably be chopped or automatically handled, then it might be time to reconsider.
How many pages per second . . . AVERAGE, INCLUDING dealing with jams and messes . . . does your automated glue-hating system read clean?
If you cannot comfortably produce properly readable, OCRable pages at better than one per second, then you had better think of a few hundred thousand seconds.
One or a half per second is in any case what a camera with a system like mine could give you, once you are up to speed. I have occasionally torn glued pages apart for photographic work, but for me that was no problem, so guillotining and trimming did nt come into it.
At eight hours per day, you should be able to capture more than 100000 pages per 5-day week. It certainly is not nice, but it beats a "faster" system that does not work, or at least does not work faster.
Just thoughts, together with the thought: "Sooner you than me!" ;-)

Go well folks,

Jon

On 2010/04/15 03:09 AM, don kretz wrote:

I bought a crappy digital camera to use

"most of the time". It didn't even come with

a manual - just a url to download it.

But it did have instructions on how to

scan a book.

Don

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 6:07 PM, Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com> wrote:

Hi Jon,

Nope, I think you're part of a pretty popular movement there.
There's a whole cottage industry of building home-made
book scanners that consist of a jig to hold the book and
a pair of digital cameras positioned to capture the two
facing pages. Look at http://www.diybookscanner.org/

Personally, I still use a flatbed, but that's because
I'm a Luddite.

On 14-Apr-2010 10:42, Jon Richfield wrote:

FWIW, Since I bought myself a digital camera for general use, plus a
copy of Omniscan, my scanner has been pretty well idle.

[...]

Is my choice unusual in any way?

============================================================
Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com>
Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.

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