We talk a lot about hardware here at BookLiberator, it is what we spend most of our time on after all, but it is time to shine a light on the software behind the scenes that turns our page images into beautifully produced “book” collections. That software comes in two parts, scantailor, written by Joseph Artsimovich and djvubind, written by strider1551 of DIYBookScanner.
Scantailor takes the page images from your camera’s memory card:
and turns them into nicely cropped, rotated, and white balanced images like this:
Djuvubind takes all of those individual images, stitches them together, and compresses that into a very tiny book in the djvu format. I have 1400 page academic books that are now pleasantly readable 10 MB files thanks to this combination of Scantailor and Djvubind.
All of this happens automatically. For each of those 1400 page books all I had to do was 1) rotate the first two pages, 2) hit “Go” for auto crop, 3) draw a box around the few pictures so that their full resolution would be preserved in the final output, 4) run djvubind.
Very simple, very easy. When djvubind, which is less than two weeks old, gets the last kinks out, it will be possible to use the same 4 steps to get a tiny book full of beautiful page images which also has a layer of OCR embedded for text searching.
For anyone who has been waiting to get into personal book scanning until the software develops, wait no more.
Crossposted with BookLiberator
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