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 [...]
Author Archives: ian
Software for everyone
Posted in Community, Documentation Tagged bklib, book, book digitization, book liberator, djvu, djvubind, image procesing, OCR, page processing, personal digitization, scantailor Leave a comment
Bittorrent and Miro, a better Distributed Proofreading
If you spend some time in the ebook community you inevitably run into Distributed Proofreading, the collaborative proofreading group that supplies Project Gutenberg with high quality text versions of Public Domain books. They are a small community of dedicated editors doing good work. Unfortunately, they are also becoming irrelevant to most of the issues in [...]
Posted in Community Tagged bittorrent, bklib, book digitization, book liberator, distributed proofreading, miro, OCR, project gutenbert Comments closed
The people’s words
One of the biggest problems for people, like Project Gutenberg, who want to digitize and share our culture’s public domain works, is tracking down and confirming that a work is no longer under copyright. Gutenberg is not alone, towards the end of last month I ran into an opinion piece on teleread arguing that Amazon [...]
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Pushing Paper
Great piece up today by Paul Grahm called Post-Medium Publishing
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A Bit about Book Ripping
Digitizing your own books The Book Ripper community, bkrpr.org, came together to take the difficulty out of digitizing books. Unlike music, movies, or even loose paper, books have proved surprisingly difficult to break out of their analog format. Very complicated robotic scanners, costing tens of thousands of dollars, have been built to address this problem, [...]
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The paper analog
Yesterday’s EFF deeplinks blog picked up our DRM exploit post from March and linked it with a paper from Microsoft security engineers arguing that DRM is doomed to failure. Now might be a good time take another look at just how big this analog hole is, since, however big it is, Amazon’s new 9.7″ screen [...]
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Building in Parallel
We’ve talked about other efforts to digitize books before but now things are getting a lot closer to home. Yesterday, a group of three grad students posted an instructable on how to build a book scanning device using a similar V-shaped cradle, the same camera model, and for about the same price as our design. [...]
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Grouping
We’ve got a google group! Now that a number of people are in the process of building their own book rippers we need a place where we can pull together the multiple discussions we’ve been having over email and in other forums. The google group should do that very nicely. Come on by. For those [...]
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Universal e-book DRM exploit discovered!
Sort of. There is a common joke in e-book and book digitization circles that paper is the original, and most effective, DRM available for books. This is mostly true, though anyone with a sheet-fed scanner quickly learns that it is a book’s binding that stops it from being easily digitized, not its paper. Yet, wherever [...]
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Paperback testing begins in earnest
I’ve got a couple of ideas for how to best tailor our current design for an all paper-back diet and have lined up what I need to start testing them this week.
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