Scanners Wanted!

[Enkidu]

Hello all industrious forumites.

This competition has no immediate physical reward; an esoteric alias’ immortal glory shall be your only compensation. [Rage—Goddess, sing of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, / hurtling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, …]

How can you contribute to this community? You may not have a wealth of knowledge stored up in your head that spills forth every time someone asks a question. You, in fact, may even be the person posing the question. Considering that many practitioners of your hobby have been performing its art long before you, how can you possibly contribute? This task may seem, at first, daunting. Never fear (for all we must fear is fear itself), but instead begin your contribution vigorously and without trepidation.

No matter what your interests—no matter how specialized and isolated your pursuit—relevant books exist. ‘Where,’ you might ask. The books exist, often untapped, on the selves at your local library. You can request this book from your library, simply read it yourself, and then pitifully attempt to regurgitate the information to us, your friends and fellow travelers. Another course of action is to scan the book and share it—instead of relying on your own mental capacity to transfer the text’s wealth of knowledge on to future members of this community. The path that involves a scanner is preferred.

The tools of the trade are mostly free: they are all free except one. A scanner costs a small sum of money. Can you spare fifty dollars? (If you can’t, get a job.) Any scanner will work, but a specialty book scanner is unquestionably the best. The following linked information is an example of a book scanner.

http://www.plustek.com/product/book3600.asp

Other tools (yay! on to the free ones) include OCR software and Adobe Acrobat or DJVU software. (Currently, the latest version of Acrobat is Acrobat 8.) My favorite OCR software is Abbey FineReader.

Some relevant threads on other boards on scanning:

http://www.roguesci.org/theforum/showthread.php?t=1232
http://www.roguesci.org/theforum/showthread.php?t=6372	
http://www.roguesci.org/theforum/showthread.php?t=6257
http://www.roguesci.org/theforum/showthread.php?t=2304
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=2442

This competition will be judged on quality of OCR text and images, size of file, completion time from time of announcement (ehem, honesty is necessary), and maybe a few other things.

Make sure the book you want to scan hasn’t been scanned before! Check demonoid, gigapedia, other boards, etc. UTFSE, please. Don’t do the work of scanning if somebody’s already beat you to it.

IMO, if you don’t know what to scan, and you want an interesting, obtainable, short book, this list is a good place to start.

http://www.erowid.org/library/books/a_books.shtml

SOME POSTS ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE IN THIS THREAD. THESE INCLUDE REQUESTS, FLAMING, NAGGING, OT DISCUSSION ABOUT SCANNERS AND SOFTWARE (START A NEW THREAD), ‘ENKIDU I FUCKING HATE/LOVE YOU,’ AND YOUR GENERAL LIES ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE ‘DEFINITELY GOING TO FUCKING SCAN.’ Use your common sense about what to post here.

So, tell us what you are going to scan!

[Enkidu]

Alright, well, I finally got around to fucking scanning something.

You can find Love Drugs by Otto Snow, freshly scanned and OCR'd by yours truly, in this thread on DRO.

http://www.dererumomnis.org/bbs/index.php?topic=70.0