Comments on: How To Scan Public Domain Books – Tips From A Professional Book Scanner

By: andy baird

andy baird — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:42:46 +0000

Hi Debra, I too have been using FreeOCR and have noticed that sometimes it produces a lot of gibberish which makes the OCR’d text difficult to read. I’ve realised that it’s trying to read every mark and blemish on the page and trying to convert it to text, so i’ve taken to using the Crop Image button on the left hand side.(It’s a little dotted square) If you use this you can highlight just the words on the scanned page, it gives a much cleaner, clearer conversion , and there’s a LOT less gibberish to wade through and correct!

By: J Arthur Davis

J Arthur Davis — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:10:21 +0000

If the above price is too much for a scanner take a look at your state surplus store. Here in Pennsylvania we have this kind of store. As items are updated the old ones are sold at the surplus store. You can find good scanners in the 5 to 25 dollar range. I picked up two Dell Optiplex 745 computers for $50.00 each. These are top of the line computers that are 5 years old at best. All I did was add more memory and I now have a screaming machine for less than $100.00.
Check around, you may have to make some calls, but the investment in time will more than pay for itself.

Good Shopping!

By: WorldCat - A Simple Yet Very Effective Tool For Tracking Down Public Domain Books In Your Niche

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:37:07 +0000

[...] How To Scan Public Domain Books – Tips From A Professional Book Scanner [...]

By: Logan

Logan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:57:39 +0000

Thanks Mr. Richardson for sharing this news, it’s very exciting. I sooooo want one of these for Christmas!

By: Robb Richardson

Robb Richardson — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:32:23 +0000

We have recently introduced the first high resolution public walk up book scanner for pubilc libraries – the “book2net Spirit”.

Introduced at the ALA in Washington in June. Production units will start delivering in August 2010 – Under $9k or $200/mth.

Look for them at a Library near you.

Robb Richardson
rrichardson@ristech.ca

By: Logan

Logan — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:01:13 +0000

Hi Jim,

I had to read this question a few times but I think I understand what you are asking.

Basically, when it comes to Public Domain content, your objective is to be able to use that content to create a product right? So you need a way to convert the content into an editable format. In other words, you need to be able to get it into your computer so that you can actually do something with it.

There’s two sources of Public Domain content available to you (we’ll keep this conversation limited to Public Domain books for now)…

1) Public Domain books in a physical form – the only to get the content from a physical copy of a book is to have it scanned. Once you have it scanned you’ve got a digital version of the book. You then have something you can edit and convert into a new product. There are millions upon millions of Public Domain books that haven’t been scanned and placed online yet.

2) Public Domain books in digital form – these are books that have already been scanned and placed online for download (which only represents just a very, very small fraction of what’s actually available in the Public Domain). The benefit of these digital versions of course is that much of the work has already been done for you in terms of shifting the content into a digital state. The downside is that everybody and their brother has easy access to the same books. That doesn’t mean these books are worthless, you just have to keep that in mind when considering what to do with the content in terms of product creation.

I hope I’ve answered your question.

I got confused upon first reading it because of this part ~ “how do you scan an item when it is in the public domain and not in a physical form until it is downloaded from where ever you find it”.

If an item is downloadable then by it’s nature, it’s already in a digital state. There’s no need to scan it again. The point of scanning is simply to be able to convert a physical book into digital, editable content so that you can actually use it in some fashion.

Thanks Jim!

Logan

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:00:13 +0000

Since scanning is done by placing the physical product onto the scanner how do you scan an item when it is in the public domain and not in a physical form until it is downloaded from where ever you find it?