This machine automatically scans books from cover to cover

Hard data is hard to find, but roughly 100 million books were published prior to the 21st century. Of those, a significant portion were never available in a digital format and haven’t yet been digitized, which means their content is effectively inaccessible to most people today. To bring that content into the digital world, Redditor bradmattson built this machine that automatically scans books from cover to cover.

There are, of course, already machines on the market for scanning books. But the inexpensive models require manual page-turning and the more feature-packed models are very expensive. Bradmattson’s book scanner is fully automatic and can scan a whole stack of books without the assistance of a human operator. And the machine is relatively affordable to build, which makes it easier to justify the digitization of books that might otherwise be overlooked.

Oh, and it is portable. The whole thing folds up into a briefcase, so the operator can take it from location to location, digitizing books along the way.

As you’d expect, this machine is fairly complex. But the basic gist is that a stack of books rests on one side and gravity drops each one down onto a feed mechanism, which carries the book to the scanning area. There, a suction gripper lifts the cover. Next, a plexiglass press holds down the pages while a camera snaps a photo. To flip to the next page, a PC fan creates negative pressure to gently grip the paper and then the whole process repeats. When the whole book has been scanned, it slides over to the output area and the next book enters the scanning area.

A computer running Python oversees the process and catalogs the images. It controls the various motors through an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board paired with a CNC shield, as well as additional relays and a servo driver board.