I've used one of the DIY Bookscanners kits. Worked great and I didn't have
to go into the dumpster.  They did a good job on the components and
assembly was rather easy.

However, it is all very much a manual process. An operator has to work the
machine to scan all the pages.
In addition, there's a post-processing part using a bit of software called
ScanTailor where you assemble your captures images ( cropping, adjusting,
etc). Then, you have to run all those through Tesseract OCR and an image
compressor to get PDFs, if that's what you want.

The scanner probably cannot do large format stuff like maps and posters,
but since it's just using standard cameras, you can just take the cameras
off and use them capture images with a standard tripod.

OCR to ePub is not really possible. Or at least, I don't think it's
possible.

Lots of work...like actual work someone has to do. But the quality is very
good, much better than the Xerox MFP scanners we used to scan loose leaf
articles.





On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Pikas, Christina K. <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I think this is what the class at Wisconsin built:
> http://lis644bookscanner.wordpress.com/
>
> Christina
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Joe Hourcle
> Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2014 6:44 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Book scanner suggestions redux
>
> On Mar 3, 2014, at 10:54 AM, Aaron Rubinstein wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > We're looking to purchase a book scanner and I was hoping to get some
> recommendations from those who've had experience.
>
> I don't have experience, but a couple of years back, a group started
> selling kits to make book scanners:
>
>         http://diybookscanner.myshopify.com/products/diy-book-scanner-kit
>
>
> It's $500+shipping, and missing some parts (glass, cameras, paint), but it
> means that instead of carpentry skills, you just need experience assembling
> things.
>
> -Joe
>