“The Secret Life of the Book”

- explore a DIY digitisation workflow taking you from the act of scanning images and objects, learning how to process and edit them with software like ocrupus, blender and OpenCV, storing and manipulating them online and finally, through to printing their digital forms out, mashed together with comments, citations, automatic qr codes and even other digital objects!

Haven’t you always wanted to make your own book?

A basic workflow will be there (to scan books, perform clean up and OCR, etc) but the workflow components are intended to be repurposed and played with.

Think about:

• how to best print off a list of tweets or someone’s delicious.com account?
• Create PDFs from atom feeds and print them off?
• Use Project Gutenburg books to create your own versions of the classics?
• Use Flickr to add photos opposite to a page based on page’s content?
• Tear apart PDFs to make them useful again?
• Create a version of the book with comments from your friends inlined with the text?
• Scan in images and learn to spot your friends faces *without* using iPhoto?
• Or how about using a line-laser and a turntable to make a DIY 3D scanner?

[Note: The default book used will be Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” (via Doctorow’s own craphound.com or amazon) as this is under a suitable creative commons licence. We can duplicate the contents for free - retaining the same licence of course - but we will make our own artwork!)

(Link to Cory’s ‘Download for Free’ page - please also consider buying the book if you like it and/or donating a copy as he suggests!)

Keywords: digitisation, OCR, 3D, webcams, bookbinding, annotations, socialcommenting, repurposing, dynamicbooks, papercraft, digitalobjects, apis, workflow, ephemeralbooks.

Organised by Ben O’Steen @benosteen

Opinions very welcome!