Ask HN: Digitize a Library?

1 ggeorgovassilis 3 6/25/2025, 9:56:26 AM

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!

Comments (3)

warrenm · 3h ago

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

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

Rotundo · 7h ago

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.

dsq · 11h ago

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.