Bowerbird wrote:
jon said:
Not possible, unless one bought the *big buck* (above office-level) sheet feed or page turning scanners, or one simply used a photocopy machine, and captured the low-rez images it produces.
my girlfriend's office has a $10,000 lanier just down the hall. that's the kind of machine i was talking about. their website says that their high-end machines can scan 60+ pages an hour.
But what resolution? With scanners that move something with respect to the page, the higher the resolution, the slower it is. (On the other hand, today's 12 megapixel digital cameras, which for "My Antonia" would produce approximately 600 dpi quality, take a snapshot of the whole page, and can transfer the file in very short time, short than it takes to turn the page.)
but i grant you that a scanning time of a few hours (or more) is much more in line with what most normal people can attain, even those with lots of experience like yourself...
Well, I'm not an experienced scanner (there's a difference between understanding the principles, and actual experience), but I think by the time I got finished with My Antonia, I gained a few stripes. <smile/>
There's still need for the whiz-bang scan cleanup software, which I know is expensive.
donovan was working on some open-source deskewing routines. might want to check that out.
O.k., thanks. Open source, high-quality deskewing routines are definitely needed! Now, it's a matter to also get a high-quality open source cropping and normalization application.
and i'm told that abbyy does a fairly good job setting brightness and contrast automatically. so the other thing that needs to be done is to standardize the placement of each scan relative to each other, which isn't hard. (removing curvature is a bear, but the best new scanner out -- the optik? -- lets you lay the book on the edge of the bed, which i understand effectively cures the curvature problems.)
Yes, I've heard of these book-oriented scanners which are more gentle on bindings (but even here the binding is stressed.) There's a web site somewhere giving a review of the model you describe, but don't have the URL handy.
but distributed proofreaders is more interested in doing new books than fixing old ones. they're volunteers who set their own priorities.
Yes, that is true. There is a lot of interest in DP to redo a lot of the pre-DP classics in the PG corpus, from what I understand, so it may get done anyway even if PG does not encourage it. Jon