Book Scanner

Recently Devin's Grandad Hurst has been putting together some family history stories for an upcoming family reunion. I have been scanning many family documents for him. One Saturday I was asked to scan several pages from a family history book that was bound. Many of you have copied pages from a book but as you know it is quite difficult to get a good scan. Especially around the binding in the middle. Being a very nerdy person I knew that Google has been scanning books using digital cameras. I will say that Google's setup from what I can tell uses 4 infrared cameras 2 for each side of the book and then use software to create the image in 3D and then flatten the image to take care of the curve on the page. While this setup is really cool I did not need such a setup. I did some research on line and found a much simpler setup. So I spent some time building a book scanner.

I wanted to do this in the least expensive way possible. So I built my scanner for $31. I will say that $26 was spent on the camera tripod. The rest was spent on a piece of glass to flatten the page and a can of black spray paint. The rest is built out of cardboard and scrap wood. Notice the long bolts holding the base together the board broke in half.

The scans came out in good condition. I will say better than putting the results on a flat bed scanner.

Luckily the book only had text on the right side of the page so this ended up being much easier to put together. I really had fun putting this together and getting the pages scanned.