The debate between physical books and digital books hasn't disappeared. Both sides present a formidable defense, and it's the user's responsibility to determine which format is more convenient. Some people prefer the best of both worlds: owning the book along with a method to preserve it digitally. That's how we arrive at building a homemade book scanner.
There are professional services for scanning books, but in most of them, the book must be destroyed. This is viable if its physical integrity is already compromised (partial burns, moisture, etc.), but with solid copies that can provide several more years of reading, it's almost painful to think about destroying them. On the other hand, books are becoming increasingly expensive, and I'm not just referring to their price tag. Ink, paper, and glue, not to mention energy and distribution, are factors that slowly make something that should have much wider access prohibitive. That is the first point raised by advocates of digital books.
Publishers and distribution companies have been involved in very serious scandals and legal disputes in their attempt to "exploit" digital books. However, "digital" is just a tool, which should by no means be exclusive to corporations.
With this in mind, some book and technology enthusiasts have started an adventure that has lasted several years, based on the development of a homemade book scanner. The first advantage of this type of scanner is that it does not require destroying the book. The user just needs to flip through the pages, and although it might seem tedious, scanning an average book should not take more than twenty minutes or half an hour.
The second advantage is its relatively low cost. Open source designs are within everyone's reach on the web, and the only thing the user has to pay is the cost of materials. Perhaps the most expensive part of these configurations is the use of one or two cameras with adequate resolution to capture the text, but these days, even the simplest sensor offers decent resolution. Needless to say, all plans can be modified, and anyone who has the possibility to reuse elements should not hesitate for a second.
The most complicated aspect to process in a book scanner is legality. Certainly it is not illegal to build and use a book scanner, no matter what the copyright hawks might think. If you can make backups of your games or music CDs to protect the original medium, the same extends to a book. Now, if the user decides to sell their physical copy and/or share the digital version, we enter a completely different situation...
https://old.neoteo.com/el-primer-libro-escrito-por-un-ordenador/
