Ask HN: Digitize a Library?

by ggeorgovassilis on 6/25/2025, 9:56:26 AM with 3 comments
My father, who was an homme des lettres, recently passed away, leaving us his huge collection of books. I'd like to make digital copies, but running them through a flatbed scanner would take too long. Are there faster ways? Eg. recording a video of flipping through the book's pages with a software extracting the individual pages from the book? OCR would be nice to have but not necessary. TIA!

  • by Rotundo on 6/25/2025, 2:49:33 PM

    Solutions depend on the amount of books you have to scan.

    - For "disposable" books, cut the spine and haul the paper through a sheet-feeding scanner; - For non-disposable books, photograph each page;

    Which is near impossible to do for a serious collection: scanning 10 books a day, every day, is only about 3500 books.

    There are companies that will do the work for you, including meta data, but it will cost a small fortune.

    Perhaps best to think about why you want to make copies.

  • by dsq on 6/25/2025, 11:24:31 AM

    I am also looking for a similar solution, but for various documents of different sizes and types.

    Ideally it would also make it easy to give names for folders and subfolders.

  • by warrenm on 6/25/2025, 6:38:56 PM

    Might consider something like a CZUR https://shop.czur.com/

    (no affiliation - have had them recommended on a couple subs on reddit)