Maybe look up how Google is doing it? - Meryn Stol

If you bought any of those books from amazon, then some of them may be searchable through your "amazon library". Having said that, it's spotty coverage (in terms of which books are indexed). Same thing for google. - Ilya Grigorik

I would first look on certain websites (which I would obviously never use myself and certainly don't know the URLs of) to check whether somebody has already scanned them. - Matt Leifer

Meryn - Done that. Not much help... - Michael Nielsen

Ilya - I probably bought a couple hundred (or more) from Amazon. SO that's a great idea. - Michael Nielsen

Incidentally, I found http://sealedabstract.com/... very helpful on this subject. But it'd still be hundreds of hours of work, minimum. - Michael Nielsen

I never realized I could search through my Amazon purchases. Interesting. Quite a value-add from Amazon! - Meryn Stol

Looks like Google will give you full access if you scan the barcodes: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009... Not clear if this is useful for re-reading, or if it's possible to download... - Michael Nielsen

I tried that.. no dice. It only works for books that have been "open sourced" by publisher or are not under copyright, which is to say, basically nothing. Ok, not entirely true, but of limited value.. - Ilya Grigorik

Thanks, Ilya. That's one weird Google blog post, then. ("It works for all the books except the ones it doesn't work for. That is, most of them.") - Michael Nielsen

the way I understood the Google barcode scan was that since it appears you own a physical copy of the book, you can have access to a digital copy. Am I wrong in this, because I was going to do it for my books. - Kimber Scott from BuddyFeed

Kimber, yes, but the amount of digitized books on Google Books is limited. Actually, the bar code does not constitute proof of ownership. You can do fulltext search through all books on Google Books. But with "my library" you can limit your search to a group of books. (Pedro, yeah exactly) - Meryn Stol

I just gave it a try. I scanned a couple of barcodes but its really just a faster way to create a list. I don't think the access rights changes at all. - Pedro Beltrao

That's the thing.. The scan just gives you the ISBN, which you can find anywhere anyway - it doesn't prove that you own the book in any way, shape or form. For this reason, only books that are not copyrighted are available for search. - Ilya Grigorik

Ilya, there are copyrighted books searchable on Google Book search. Just not all of them because not all publishers have signed up for the program, or have not committed their whole library. Full search does not mean you can read it in full though! - Meryn Stol

Ah, well that's good news! Now we just need to get all the other publishers on the same bandwagon. ;-) - Ilya Grigorik

Neil - Yeah, that'd be very nice. Sadly, I haven't found anything like that. - Michael Nielsen

yeah, but that's not going to happen either - publishers are more than happy to charge you twice for the same material - once for print and once for e. Related, Springer now has a $25 print on demand service available to patrons of libraries that buy the big ebook packages - we only have it for medical books right now, or i'd try it - Christina Pikas

Maybe a pragmatic 80/20 split - re-buy the most important books (those that are not from Amazon) as e-books; then decide if you want to cut off the binding on the remaining books and have em scanned (as suggested in article), or make do with a semi good scan without damaging the book (pay a student to run them through a copy/scanning machine). - Christof TD

Please try to save the integrity of the book. You may find that they will be quite valuable. Were some of them gifts? Do they have inscriptions you want to keep? Some things to consider. - Melanie Reed

On 2nd thought you'd better wait a little (machines like the Google book scanner should become more readily available soon) - reading about the Google Book Scanning Machine: http://www.npr.org/blogs... - Christof TD

Here we go - Book Drive Pro (looks quite industrial; but still doesn't solve the page-turning problem) - http://pro.atiz.com/ or http://mini.atiz.com/ (video on the pro version site shows the scanning workflow); ~several hundred hours for 1000 books... at least it gives you a high-quality outcome without damaging books - Christof TD

Hmm - you could build this thing yourself (Atiz Book Drive Pro): make a V-shape cradle, including a plastic V-shape that comes down on the book (like in the video), several mounts for two DSLR cameras and a little black tent with lights -> then run an edge-detection algorithm on the pictures taken using the Python Imaging Library; this leaves only finding an open-source OCR library. - Christof TD

Christof - For all but a tiny fraction of the books (which I'll probably keep), I'm not worried about destroying them as part of the scanning process. Your 80/20 suggestion is a really interesting one... - Michael Nielsen

You could donate the destroyed books to a local school science library; maybe the library will find the resources to glue them back together again :-) - Christof TD

If you are a DIY person check out http://www.geocities.jp/takasci... and http://www.instructables.com/id... . My personal solution (I got of most my books some years ago - some I kept and scanned them manually) is a change of mindset. Most books are just dead trees that catch dust and are need much to rarely to excuse their storage. I am not sure if this is the case for you. But I rely on the prospect that the "possession" model will be displaced by the "access" model (e.g O'Reilly's Safari) in the near future. - Konrad Förstner

Thanks for the link: http://www.instructables.com/id... ...this was exactly what I was thinking (see video at that link for workflow); 20 min. for each book is not too bad. Update: their open source software takes 3 hours to process a book into a PDF. - Christof TD

Here's my stupid idea: 1) The most difficult part: Build a little stand that automatically flips through the pages - probably doesn't need to be as sophisticated as in the Instructables link above. 2) Take a HD video cam and make a video of the pages being flipped. 3) Write a little script that takes screencaps from the video every other second, after the pages have been flipped. 4) Send all the screencaps to Evernote to use their OCR and search. - Victor / Mendeley Team

But then again, it would probably be easier to just sync a photo camera with the page flipping :-) Like I said, stupid idea! - Victor / Mendeley Team

Here are the heavyweights: Treventus Book Scanner Robot (at Bavarian State Library, Munich) - http://www.treventus.com/booksca... and Google/ Microsoft supposedly use Kirtas high-performance scanners - http://content.zdnet.com/2346-95... ... ah, the page-flipper uses suction: http://www.kirtas.com/ - Christof TD

Video of Treventus ScanRobot in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Christof TD

Ah, sweet.. Now i just need one of those for my house! :-) - Ilya Grigorik

buy a high speed scanner - abuzarhamza

abuzarhamza - Even at 20 pages per minute, with roughly 300,000 pages that's roughly 300 hours of scanning... - Michael Nielsen

How about this: (1) create a new organization called the Nielsen University library (2) offer your library's collection to google to become part of their scanned collection (3) make the one condition of the offer to google be that you get the scans for private use - Jonathan Eisen

I suppose that this would not be a good time to point out to you that ownership of the physical volume doesn't entitle you to scan the content and create a digital version; that's what got Google into trouble in the first place. You, as an individual, haven't the right to create (even for personal, private use) digital versions of content where other entities hold the rights. - Jill O'Neill

Don't forget that Michael is covered by Canadian law, which is significantly more lenient on copyright than US law. That's why I suggested finding pirate copies on the net. I believe that under Canadian law might not be liable for downloading them, but only for uploading. However, the situation is complicated so don't quote me on that. After downloading, you are in no better or worse shape than if you had scanned the books yourself. - Matt Leifer

I note - I had my tongue planted deeply in my cheek when I said he should get google to do the scanning - just in case people cannot see where my tongue was - Jonathan Eisen

Jonathan: Your original comment gave me, at least, quite a smile :-). Sadly, I can't imagine Google would find much in my library that they don't already have. Maybe the classic "Venus on the Half Shell"... - Michael Nielsen

Jill - Is it true in Canada that you can't legally transfer between media in this way? I know I've been told that in some jurisdictions this definitely _is_ allowed, but I don't recall in which jurisdictions. - Michael Nielsen

Michael: I was speaking from a US-centric view. That said, I would be surprised if -- to pick a publisher at random -- HarperCollins (whether US or Canada) would look favorably on such scanning activity. Libraries are permitted to scan for purposes of preservation under specific conditions, but I am not sure that the same permission has ever legislatively been extended to private individuals. I could be wrong; as I said, I was speaking from a US centric viewpoint and I don't know Canadian copyright law. However, given the Berne Treaty, it would seem to me that a violation of copyright under US law could still be treated as infringement in Canada even if things like "fair use" are defined and handled differently in the two countries. At the least, one would counsel caution.... - Jill O'Neill

Have you read Victor Vinge's Rainbows End? ok it's a bit extreme but it works for gene sequencing :) - Alexei

the fujitsu snapscan is reasonably good but v manual and destructive, I've taken to guillotining spines and feeding pages while watching tv .. ~ couple hrs / book. End result not that good, big bulky pdfs. Getting eprints would be much better. - Alexei

Thankyou, by the way, to everyone who's been commenting on this! - Michael Nielsen

If you want to use all free and open source tools, read this blog post: http://philikon.wordpress.com/2009... - Nate Aune