Hey, I have this book in paper and would like to scan its pages to share on something like z-library for others to access.
So I wanted to ask what is the best way to go about scanning all the pages of the book? Something like those images to pdf scanners on your phone or something else?
Also where should I upload it to? Is Z-library okay? And is it safe to upload it? Could it be traceable back to me and potentially getting me in trouble?
Thanks in advance
Looking at pictures when trying to read is absurdly distracting, I wouldn’t recommend just taking pictures. Instead, you can use a tool to convert a photo into a pdf document. It rips the text from the photo and types it for you. That enables you to just upload the text, which makes for a much smaller file size while having higher quality for the things that matter. But it’s still very involved, you will definitely want to proofread the entire PDF to ensure it didn’t make any errors.
Unlike that other guy, I think the less valuable a book is the more it needs to be digitized. An incredibly valuable book will be stored in a museum, and will likely be digitized if it needs to be and is capable of being. Whereas there are millions of books that don’t get many copies and no one thinks to digitize them because they’re not “important”. That results in immeasurable amounts of lost media. Plus, if the book is cheap, then there shouldn’t be any issue getting a second copy just to tear off the spine and scan it in, right?
Also worth noting, if the book is valuable and you do tear off the spine, there are a ton of places you can send the papers to and they’ll make you a custom spine for the book and rebind it for you.
So, yes I do plan on taking pictures and converting them into pdfs.
About the book itself it is just kinda expensive ($150 USD) and I only found one copy of the book on Z-library but the images in it were very poor.
I won’t break the spine of it because I still need the book for my studies.
So yea still think I should upload the pages of the books somewhere?
To your last statement, the answer is always yes lol. Admittedly, without despining it your going to have difficulties scanning in the text closest to the middle of the book, but any knowledge or media being archived is amazing.
I think you’re severely underestimating the effort of digitizing it. Usually the way that’s done is to break or saw off the spine and scan every page individually using a scanner, which is obviously a destructive process. Unless it’s an exceedingly rare book it probably is not worth the effort.
It is a rare expensive book that I wish other can have access to. I don’t want to break the spine of the book as I am still using it for my studies, can I not just scan each page of the book using my phone, then convert them into pdfs and merge? Is that a bad idea?
And if it is an exceeding rare book, you probably don’t want to be destroying it to scan it. I think it’s possible to use a decent camera instead of a scanner, but it is still quite an involved process. Look at what Google did…
The books were placed in a custom-built mechanical cradle that adjusted the book spine in place while an array of lights and optical instruments scanned the two open pages. Each page would have two cameras directed at it capturing the image, while a range finder LIDAR overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book’s surface to capture the curvature of the paper. A human operator would turn the pages by hand, using a foot pedal to take the photographs. With no need to flatten the pages or align them perfectly, Google’s system not only reached a remarkable efficiency and speed but also helped protect the fragile collections from being over-handled. Afterwards, the crude images went through three levels of processing: first, de-warping algorithms used the LIDAR data fix the pages’ curvature. Then, optical character recognition (OCR) software transformed the raw images into text, and, lastly, another round of algorithms extracted page numbers, footnotes, illustrations and diagrams.
And then all this effort was ruled illegal and the collection never saw the light of day. Thanks, copyright mafia.
Would argue the opposite. If no one has shared it yet and it’s not rare / valuable, saw it, use a double sided auto feed scanner, and share it.
Agree it’s not too easy to do as a one off, but once you get the hang of it maybe more will come. I often have a hard time finding digital books so am in favor of more of this
When I would copy or scan books, I’d hold one page onto the scanner at a time, then crop and straighten each page in pdf before OCRing it.
Scan it in a way you actually can. Using a Phone app to scan to PDF is just fine.
Yea I think this is the only viable option for me.
One thing to keep in mind is PDF metadata. Check it, so it doesn’t contain your name as author or other identifying information.
Thank you for sharing the wealth.
Anna’s Archive (Currently located at [https://annas-archive.gd/]) would be my site of choice to share the book on! I can’t comment on the scanning thing though, sorry about that.
What about traceability? Could they figure out somehow who was behind it?
That I cannot answer. The way Anna’s Archive works, I believe, is that the files are stored somewhere else. They do care about privacy though, and even accounts are made without email with a random string as your username. Might want to look into it some more.
