DIY
electronics
origami
UPDATE - 23 Jan 2011 Please see the Ion BookSaver , which uses basically the same design as the BookLiberator but will be available at a cheaper price and sooner. You can read more about it in Ion's press release . We have no affiliation with Ion and receive no compensation for mentioning their product -- we just want affordable book digitizers to be in the hands of as many book owners as possible, and Ion's product now looks like the best way to achieve that. We have suspended work on production of the BookLiberator, while we wait to see how Ion's BookSaver is received in the market. The rest of our site has been left as-is for now.
start [BookLiberator Wiki]
Before photoscanning hundreds of pages, it is worth making sure that the lighting is uniform. Neither your visual inspection of the original paper document nor the camera LCD display or the computer screen (if you shoot from a camera connected to a computer) are good enough to see the bright and shadow areas due to non-uniform lighting (unless shadows and bright spots are very discernible). There is a commercial program (Psremote) that in its preview mode can highlight the areas that are too bright according to a selected level of luminosity. However its use is limited to cameras that can shoot from the computer and it can only show which areas are too bright at a chosen threshold rather then areas with different levels of brightness. I deviced a method which is simple and effective to check the lighting uniformity before shooting hundreds of photos.
do-it yourself repro v-cradle for paper books
The Sect of Homokaasu - The Rasterbator
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size. The Rasterbator is very easy to use.