Book People Archive

Re: Page images of books (using a digital camera)

This sounds very interesting. It might also enable me to do books that my
library will not give me on loan (anything before 1900, although sometimes
exceptions are made) --- they don't mind me bringing in a camara and
lap-top -- one librarian even told me I could bring my flatbed scanner,
instead of putting it through the photocopier first, but not all are happy
if you enter the building with loads of equipment.

Important is ofcourse how many images I can make. I need the lap-top I
think, since a camara can only hold about a 100 images, and I guess the JPG
compression doesn't help to make the images easier to OCR.

I had a look at the images. Your software (It looks like a kind of high-pass
filter to me) does a wonderful job. Will it be available for others to try?
I think cutting in two, cropping, and straightening the page images whould
make the site even more attractive. It is a lot of work, but since I started
using the Gutenberg distributed proofreaders site, I do this with my new
scans. For proofing, I sometimes dump all my page images in a large PDF
file, as the acrobat reader makes it easy to browse through them when I have
already returned the book to the library.

Jeroen Hellingman