It has taken about a week off and on to get all the pieces in place: installation of the scanner, software installation, camera calibration, three days lost while we waited for a replacement lighting housing, RTFM’ing and what not but I finished generating my first e-book with the ATIZ Bookdrive DIY scanner late this afternoon (the title is one I picked up in a used bookshop in Boston a few years back).
It took roughly 20 minutes to scan the 240+ page book (the scanning software indicated I was working thru the book at a 632 pages-per-hour clip) and then another 30 minutes or so for post-processing (deskewing the jpg images, applying automatic crops, despeckling the page backgrounds, improving contrast and ultimately producing a PDF). While scanning is a hands-on endeavor, for the most part post-processing runs unattended (after you interactively test and then set processing parameters).
The “optimized” version of the PDF weighed in at 18 megabytes—a major improvement over the “raw” version (500Mb). I suspect I can get that down but will have to experiment with what lower resolutions scans will do (I was working at 300dpi). I still need to work through various post-processing options (e.g., although the pages were faded the sample could use some brightening and I think I needed to use a higher aperture for better focus), but I can tell this is going to work well once I figure out the optimal settings and workflow.
Here’s a link to a sample PDF with a few pages from the book. The schematics of older ballparks are kind of interesting.
Sample (800K)