Hello. I’m not sure if it’s related in any way to piracy, but I don’t know yet of a better place to ask this question on Lemmy, and people often search for PDF magazines on pirate sites (like those from megathread). I have some old magazines, which I would like to scan - page by page - into digital form (for now for personal use) and merge scanned pages into PDFs for convenient reading. Some of these magazines have hundreds of pages each, so I would like to convert them to digital both fast (preferably a few pages in one minute), reliably (without blurred text and images in some places on each page), and in best quality possible. Do I need a professional scanner (for example in a multifunctional office-grade laser printer)? Could a decent portable scanner do the job just as right? Or is my phone’s camera with an appropriate scanner app completely sufficient for that? I would like to read your thoughts about this.
- fenndev ( @fenndev@fedia.io ) 11•1 year ago
Seems like we need an r/DataHoarders equivalent, or a “DigitalArchiving” magazine/community.
- passepartout ( @passepartout@feddit.de ) 1•1 year ago
Yes, that would be awesome. Right now most discussions regarding data hoarding are done in self hosting communities while e.g. adblocking discussions are often done here in the piracy community. That would both be communities with great potential and also even kind of fitting to the dbzer0 instance.
- CCL ( @CCL@links.hackliberty.org ) 1•1 year ago
The first one to see the need is the one who needs to fix it. ;-)
- koper ( @koper@feddit.nl ) English1•11 months ago
There is: !datahoarder@lemmy.ml
- passepartout ( @passepartout@feddit.de ) English11•1 year ago
Some libraries have these to scan books fast. My old university had one to scan really old books (about 1500). I’m sure it could be used on magazines, you just have to find a library that has one AND is willing to let you use it.
- PixelPioneer ( @PixelPioneer@beehaw.org ) English4•1 year ago
This is the correct answer.
- passepartout ( @passepartout@feddit.de ) English5•1 year ago
It’s the conventionally correct answer indeed, but everything that does the job is correct here. Cutting open the bindings and letting it run through a scanner which can pull in the pages also does the job, but the magazines are trash after that. But then again, it could be less labour intensive and easier to automate. Also, you can do it at home with a simple scanner.
I do this sometimes for double printed pages of letters / scripts / my old diary. First i let my scanner pull all sheets on one site, then the other. There is a tool which can sort the pages afterwards accordingly with one click.
- rufus ( @rufus@discuss.tchncs.de ) English1•1 year ago
yeah. that’s probably the easiest by far. just cut the bindings and feed them into the ADF of your scanner.
those book scanners are also nice. i scanned a few chapters of books at the university library. but it takes like 10 minutes per 100 pages. you turn the pages manually. and there is a foot switch to trigger the camera above. you need a good podcast while continuously turning pages for half an hour.
- thedarkfly ( @thedarkfly@feddit.nl ) English1•1 year ago
Nice machine! How does it turn the pages?
- passepartout ( @passepartout@feddit.de ) English1•1 year ago
There are some that “suck” the current page towards the scanner head, but i think most of them rely on manually flipping the page and pressing a button to scan or make a photo.
- promodel ( @promodel@kbin.social ) 1•1 year ago
Way back when google was scanning stuff in, they open sourced their scanner, some info about it here, might be a starting point ? https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sources-their-book-scanner/