You may remember that a few months ago I did a how to make a $20 book scanner post.
What I did not know then, but I do now thanks to awesome DocumentSnap reader Luke from Australia, is that there is a whole vibrant community around building and using DIY book scanners.
The main site is diybookscanner.org, which has pictures of members’ projects.
They have a blog with the latest news, but all the action happens in the DIY Book Scanner Forum.
In the forum there are discussions about building your own book scanner, but also a bunch of helpful threads on free/open source OCR software, iPhones, camera settings, etc.
ScanTailor
I will probably be doing a post on this software alone someday, but it appears that most of the DIY types are using a free application called Scan Tailor (for latest updates about Scan Tailor, check out the section in the DIY Forum).
There is a Windows build of Scan Tailor on the Sourceforge site, along with instructions on building it yourself for Linux or OSX. (Update: there is a Mac build you can download in the forum thread).
It looks pretty fantastic if you want to be serious about scanning in your books.
I love these open source/hacker-y communities. If you have any interest in book scanning, I definitely recommend DIY Book Scanner out.
(Photo by adampadsadam)