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Comment by JDazzle | Hacker News Reader

I have a bunch of the books they want and I am definitely willing to scan them in even with the knowledge that it would be a lot of hard work.

Unfortunately, they recommend that the books be stripped and scanned page by page for "acceptable" results. That's where I lose all interest. :(

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That's if you want to use a sheet-feeding scanner, in order to save time. It's a bit of a weird suggestion, since I'd imagine the people who still have these books probably aren't the sort of people who want to destroy them just to save some time, but there are lots of other options.

You could pretty easily meet their requirements with a DSLR on a copystand. I'd do the left and right pages separately (unless you have a two-camera setup) so that everything is nice and flat.

The one oddball requirement is that users convert to CMYK. I'm not sure why they think that's a good idea. Most home scanners are purely RGB devices and they're just going to convert (shoddily) to CMYK in the driver or in a conversion program downstream. Seems like they're asking for color issues. I'd have asked for sRGB-colorspaced RGB, or "don't touch the knobs you don't understand". shrug

They're also asking for users to descreen the images which is basically a blurring feature that gets rid of the halftone that's a result of offset printing.

They're not looking for high quality archival scans, they're asking users to perform some basic workflow tasks necessary to ready the images for distribution.

It all sounds very sketchy to me. That or they're just completely incompetent.

As ctskippy speculated, I too think this is less for archival and more for "LIMITED EDITION : 500 COUNT REPRINT" commercial repurposing. However, for posterity, I certainly encourage you scan that work and submit it to as many trackers as you can and/or archive.org. Don't strip the binding and what not, of course, but you can achieve pretty high quality scans without damaging the integrity of the book nonetheless.

I never was too much into gaming but my friends have tons of good memories from many'a'Saturday spent with a good DM. It'd be great if the next generation had the same resources to play around with.

You have to strip the binding to get the scan right. I've seen lost of DnD scans in my day and the older ones are generally terrible towards the book edges due to not being able to press the page all the way down to the scanner.

We need a D&D nerd on the google book scanning team to get involved so their scanners can be use for this.

Anyone know how to connect with them??

Wizards should also reach out to this team with this request...

I think Google's project is less about preserving the book, and more about indexing the content which is a subtly different goal. They care less about high fidelity reproduction and more about content acquisition.

Or someone who can get access to some the Internet Archive's book scanning gear?

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