Almost Free Scanner

In the last weekend of the Christmas break I was sat in Starbucks in Waterstones in Edinburgh considering which of a stack of potential books I was going to spend my Christmas book tokens on. I had just been playing with a Sony eBook reader and so was thinking maybe I should take the plunge and go digital with books as well as the rest of my life.

I wondered what I would do with my existing books. It would be nice to be able search through these and have them all with me when I travel. There would be issues with copyright if I were to copy them but there would also be technical problems. How would I get them in EPUB or PDF format? I did some Googling and came across a great site diybookscanner.org. There are some really innovative designs on this site and it got my obsessive thoughts going. There were two problems.

• I only had 48 hours to play before going back to work and my wife and kids wanted some of that time.
• I didn’t have a workshop. Just a desk and some simple tools.

Could I produce a scanner in that time? Would it work?

Most of the plans on diybookscanner.org are pretty complex involving placing the book on a stand on a table and having multiple lights and cameras pointing down at it. I don’t have a table. At least I don’t have a table that isn’t already filled with stuff. So the design I came up with (pictured) turns the system upside down and puts the camera on a tripod near the floor. A frame made from some scrap wood holds a piece of glass from a clip picture frame. The camera is on a tripod on the floor. This is like some photocopiers for books. Lighting is provided by a desk lamp (fluorescent tube) under the desk at approx 45 degrees to the glass.

Setting up involves lying on the floor on your back to focus the camera and line it up with the page. This may be the usability issue that will prevent me commercialising it!

Example Page Image

In operation I have an electronic cable release on the floor that I press with my big toe keeping both hands free to manipulate the book. I take the right page, turn the book round and take the left page (the other way up), pick the book up and turn the page, repeat right and left. I did a 228 page book in under 30 minutes like this. The book was Gotama The Buddha by Ananda Coomaraswamy which I believe is out of copyright.

The resulting images are sideways on and need to be rotated 90 degrees alternately left or right. I wrote a PHP5 command line script (process_src.php) to do this. It will also do simple cropping. There is an example page image shown.

This combination means I can get from physical book to page images pretty quickly for a small book. I can flick through the pages on my laptop but they are nothing without OCR and I have run out of time! The brief attempts I have had at OCRing some of the page images have been pretty disappointing.

Is the OCR the achilles heal of the process? If I did get good OCR how easy would it be to get the text into re-flowing EPUB or similar format. These will have to be the subjects of more thought and perhaps more experimenting if I find the time.

One thing is for sure – I have more of an appreciation for the imaging process and eBook world.

Note: I do not condone the breach of copyright. Authors deserve paying for their work

Important Note: Be very careful if you try and make one of these as you end up with a piece of glass strapped to the edge of a table which is dangerous – particularly with kids around. Put a guard on it when you aren’t using it.

Does this mean that $3.51 is the cost of distributing an eBook through the Amazon system? That would imply that the publisher (nee the author) would get the value of any ebook that retailed for over this sum. With Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (which retails for $9.58 on Kindle) for example the authors would get $6.07? Somehow I doubt it!

That price tag of $9.58 doesn’t compare very well with $10.19 for the paperback version of Pirsig’s book.  The Kindle version can be yours in 60 seconds or less but it is controlled by Digital Rights Management (DRM) so really all you are buying is the right to have a permanent relationship with Amazon who will supply you with a copy to read on an authorised device. For 61c more you could have one made out of real paper that you could hand on to a friend or loved one, sell, donate to charity or even burn to keep warm. Sure it won’t last forever but it still has a residual value. My paper copy is yellowing but perfectly readable. It was printed in 1978 (that is 32 years ago!). It has a price tag of £1 and I bought it from a second hand shop for £1.50 ($2 ish) about 10 years ago.

Because, unlike Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha is out of copyright you can get a legal non-DRM ebook copy from FeedBooks and other places for free. You are free to do as you please with this. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can use Stanza to download a copy for free to your device in less than 60 seconds just like you can with a Kindle. Fortunately Amazon have released a Kindle reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch so you can have two applications on the same device that you can download the same book with. With the Amazon one you have to pay $3.51 for the privilege with the Stanza one you can do it for free. “Ah but the free one probably isn’t formatted as well or something.” I hear you say. Well you are wrong. It is the other way round. The text doesn’t wrap correctly in the Kindle application. So Amazon are attempting to charge for something that is free (as in speech) and adding minus value to it. If you don’t believe me and you have a iPhone or iPod Touch you can try this for free yourself as the first chapter of the Kindle version is free (as in beer).

Don’t get me wrong. I am the kind of guy who gets excited about gadgets and I think ebooks are really important and going to be a major medium in the next few years. I like real books but would willingly do most of my reading off a gadget and reduce the clutter in my flat. Don’t go assuming that I don’t want to pay for anything either. I do that all the time. In fact I get an urge at least once a year to give Steve Jobs lots of my money.

What I object to is people being ripped off. The thought that someone might pay $3.51 for a faulty version of something they could have for free bothers me. The thought that this process will encourage people to break copyright on works by living authors and so rip them off also bothers me. If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was available as an ebook for half the paper back cost and Robert Pirsig got most of the money then it would seem like a good deal. As it is Amazon (and probably other publishers) are setting the precedent that it is OK to rip people off. It is hard for them morally to turn around and condemn someone who scans and distributes copyright works for free. Sure they can do it legally but they have lost the battle for ‘hearts and minds’.

My hope is that the publishing industry (the bit between authors and readers) will see sense and rapidly move to a position where ebooks are available at reasonable cost – perhaps DRM free. Their role is to add value that can be charged for. If they charge more for the value they add than it is worth then the market will find a way around them. Exciting times!

Amazon have