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Comment by canuckintime | Hacker News Reader

> Lastly, you can always contribute books. If you buy a textbook or book, consider uploading it (and scanning it, should it be a physical book) in case it isn't already present in the database.

There's no easy solution for scanning physical books, is there?

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There are providers [1] that will destructively scan the book for you and return a PDF. If you want to preserve the book, you're stuck using a scanning rig [2]. The Internet Archive will also non-destructively scan as part of Open Library [3], but they only permit one checkout at a time of scanned works, and the latency can be high between sending them a book and it becoming available. FYI, 600 DPI is preferred for archival purposes.

[1] http://1dollarscan.com/ (no affiliation, just a satisfied customer, can't scan certain textbooks due to publisher threats of litigation)

[2] https://www.diybookscanner.org/

[3] https://openlibrary.org/help/faq

A big +1 for 1dollarscan.com. They've scanned many hundreds of books for me. The quality of the resulting PDFs is uniformly excellent, their turnaround time is fast, and their prices are cheap ($1 per 100 pages).

I've visited their office -- located in an inexpensive industrial district of San Jose -- on multiple occasions. They have a convenient process for receiving books in person.

I believe the owners are Japanese and the operation reminds me of the businesses I visited in Tokyo: quiet, neat, and über-efficient.

> quiet, neat, and über-efficient

I wish the same could be said for the Tokyo office I work in!

I will add a vote for bookscan.us, which I have been using since 2013 or so. Very reasonable prices and great service.

There are DIY book scanners (http://diybookscanner.org) and products such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600. The SV600 has decent features like page-detection and finger-removal (I recommend using a pencil's eraser tip). I have personally used it to scan dozens of books, with satisfactory results.

Just saw a father who had to do it fully manually for her blind daughter. I shall show your comment to him.

Scanning with your phone is getting easier. At a minimum you can take a pic of each of the pages. Software can clean up the images, sorta. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing.

I found vFlat to be magical in cleaning up book scan images you took with your phone.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.voyagerx.s...

>This app is incompatible with your device.

my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined

I remember when "cammed" books were bottom-tier and basically limited to things like 0day releases, even when done with an expensive DSLR. It's amazing how much camera technology has progressed since then; in less than a second you can get a high-resolution, extremely readable image of each page.

I used to participate in the "bookz scene", well over a decade ago. Raiding the local public libraries --- borrowing as many books as we could --- and having "scanparties" to digitise and upload them was incredibly fun, and we did it for the thrill, never thinking that one day almost all of our releases would end up in LibGen.

I use bookscan.us for this purpose: I mail the physical book to them and they send me a file a few days later for a very reasonable price.

Unfortunately it’s a destructive process.

Your local physical library may make a book scanner available. Mine does, with a posted 60-pages-at-a-time limit (though I don't know how this is enforced).

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