scantailor-advanced VS spreads

There's also https://scantailor.org/ (and a maintained fork at https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced ) which semi-automates unwarping and other corrective tasks in scanned books.

ScanTailor Advanced (downloads are in the sidebar, labeled as "Releases") is a little more complex. It takes a folder of images and performs a series of steps to produce good book scans, though it might be useful for your purpose as well. The first step after importing images is to split them up, and ScanTailor does this by looking for straight lines that might indicate a gap between pages. Now, I don't know if this will handle any more than two pictures per image, but it will at least handle doubles. ScanTailor will also attempt to automatically deskew pictures, and then there are a few steps that you'll need to take to make your pictures come out nicely.

My preferred method is to take pictures of all the pages of the book (Open Camera has a nice option to take a new picture every n seconds), optionally touch them up with ScanTailor (automated), and then turn all the images to a PDF using NAPS2 (which will OCR the text as it goes in).

Next is the cleanup. Scan Tailor is the best game in town for this, but it's a dead project. Instead, there are two forks that have picked up where the original developers left off. Scan Tailor Advanced is my current fork of choice, though Scan Tailor Universal tries to add new usability features. For whatever reason, only Advanced makes full use of my CPU, so it's several times faster than Universal for the time being.

No problem. https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced/releases

If you are interested in more ways to treat a scan, ScanTailor is definitely an option. I am using a fork called ScanTailor Advanced which is available under GPL-3.0 on GitHub. With this tool you can also crop your images and apply options like threshold or posterization to improve readability while further reducing the file size.

I use a £15 arm with a vice grip for my phone from Amazon, copy the files to my laptop and then run a bash for-loop of the tesseract CLI over the resultant files.

I use https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced to deskew the images and generate the PDF.

It isn't perfect but my purposes are more around research than publication, so, YMMV!

Spreads[0] is probably what you are referring to. Some backstory:

I saw the diybookscanner community - which at that point mostly had Daniel Reetz [1] as its active contributor- struggle with mechanical contraptions for triggering cameras and very little software experience. I built a simple proof of concept to reliably trigger cheap consumer cameras using software. I built it on CHDK[2], the Canon Hack Development Kit, alternative firmware for cheap consumer cameras. The proof of concept worked.

I then had a fairly large number of book scanner kits built and shipped mostly around the EU [3]. More of a work of love than a business really, even if it was formally under an llc umbrella. Johannes initially was just a customer. He wanted to build a better software solution, and within the spirit of the project did so as free software. I tried to support him at this as well as I could, setting up build infrastructure, trying to reel in more people, getting him some cameras to test, get the amazing CHDK people to port to new camera models, ...

Then real life intervened indeed.

Johannes, if you read this, I'm still grateful for the experience of having worked with a great developer like you!

[0] https://github.com/DIYBookScanner/spreads