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By Branko Collin

I have been walking around with this idea for quite some time, but simply lack the technical skills to make it happen—a high-speed book scanner made from stuff you’ve probably got lying around the house. Now Daniel Reetz has gone and done it, and his instructions can be found at instructables.com:

I’ve built two of these things now, and this instructable covers the best parts of both of them. You can build a book scanner using only hand tools plus a drill. I realized that not everyone is comfortable with using all the different hand tools you might need to make it. So I scanned a book on using hand tools that should answer all your questions. ;)

So next time you don’t have to wait forever until a Tolkien estate gives you the opportunity to create your own Lord of the Rings concordance, you just scan the books yourselves . Tip: Abbyy from time to time gives older versions of its very good OCR program Finereader away with computer mags, so keep an eye out for those.

BoingBoing says the cost of these machines are about 300 USD. Atiz sells them ready-made, but then you should add at least one zero to that sum, and possibly double the result.

 
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