bookscan VS pi-scan

Right, step 1 -> get page images, step 2 -> author images into book file. While OCR is obviously useful for search, a rotated phone screen will let you comfortably read a pdf book just fine unless you are talking about something like a textbook, in which case you probably wanted a tablet anyway.

I wrote up a guide on the authoring process using FOSS tools for some Digital Humanities folks a couple years ago: https://github.com/wikey/bookscan

It gives some background on the problem and covers a Scantailor (page crop, rotate, deskew), pdfbeads (compression, book metadata) authoring workflow, with pdftk for some general odds and ends.

I built one of these out of pine 2x4s and plywood. I thought it would be cheaper than buying one (I was wrong) but I'm also not a skilled woodworker and had to buy most of the tools.

It works quite well and I digitised dozens of textbooks I'd purchased and needed to reference but couldn't carry around every day while finishing my masters. My one had 2 Nikon mirrorless cameras controlled via Pi-Scan. https://github.com/Tenrec-Builders/pi-scan

I had a smaller toggle switch wired to the GPIO pins so I could click the scan next button without having to take my hands of the book. Once I got used to the workflow I could scan about 1000 pages per hour while watching Netflix.

I replaced it with a Czur scanner that isn't as good, but is a lot smaller and is good enough for my less demanding needs now that I'm not doing a masters degree :D