Comrades, I just got an old 80s theory book from an older comrade as a gift and you’re lucky to even find a used print-version anywhere, let alone a pdf version. Even the title of the book itself yields a handful of results at most. So I thought: This shit needs to be digitized.
Thing is, I don’t have it in me to pull this thing apart just to scan it. Scanning via phone is suboptimal in my experience and doesn’t yield the best results to read on a kindle/pdf-reader. I’d be willing to just retype the thing, but at 300 pages that’s quite the workload too.
Is there a good way to do this that’s not super out there, expensive or time consuming?
There’s book scanners: https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-book-scanner
Some of them aren’t overly expensive (especially on Amazon which is what the guide redirects to), but it’s an expense if you want to scan just one book and then will never use it again. Could probably offload it on Facebook Marketplace afterwards or, better yet, find someone who would let you use theirs? I’m guessing libraries might have these scanners.
Depending on the wear and tear on the book, a flatbed scanner could break the spine. Pressing down on it 300 times isn’t good for it if the book is already used.
This must be a sign because we started a project to overhaul our library on Prolewiki just a few days ago 😁 (one of the plans is to write a tutorial to scan books)
If you manage to scan and OCR the book (if the scanner doesn’t do it), we’re definitely interested in hosting it on ProleWiki afterwards! What’s the name of it?
Hmm, it’s just one book for me atm, but thinking about it the older folk from my local party branch probably have thousands of documents, books, papers, etc that aren’t digitized. I could possibly pitch them one of the scanners and maybe we could finance it at least in part as a party expense.
Libraries are a good idea too though. Local college libraries are public and they definitely have professional flatbeds. No idea if they have book scanners specifically for public use, but still worth a try.
It’s hardly used, but it’s still a 40 year old book and even just my trials yesterday left their mark. It’s really too precious for me to destroy it entirely.
Awesome! Definitely a worthwhile tutorial, because I suspect comrades all around the world have hundreds of books and other materials like this that got lost in archives somewhere and never made it to the web.
Also many thanks for the offer, would love to have it hosted on ProleWiki! Name of the book is
It is in German though.
Well, we have a German version of prolewiki but we’re definitely working on the English version first before worrying too much about the others. We could still upload it on that instance though if it comes in text format.
Part of my revamping of the library is to find a way for people to upload books without necessarily having an account, as getting an account is a whole process of answering thorough questions. We’re bouncing around ideas so that people can submit properly-formatted books to us (either in Word or Google Docs, it’s transferable to MediaWiki 1:1) in a way that is safe for us (not exposed to spam and viruses). To be honest I don’t know much about book scanning but I figure there’s other tutorials I can use to write my guide and cover most cases lol
Well, the tutorial is here (v1): https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:How_to_scan_and_digitize_books_tutorial