Ever wonder how Google Books and some of those other freebie book sites manage to produce those anemic looking book pages? You know, the ones that look as if someone poured a gallon of bleach on the page. Blackish looking text sitting on stark white backgrounds. Images that look as if they forgot to use Grecian Formula before leaving the house.
Well, wonder no longer. And if you weren't wondering, well, know you will have an answer to the next trivia question that pops up about Google Books. First off, they use monster scanners such as this one. No, I'm not saying this is the brand they use. In fact, there are a number of different machines out there for this type of work. This one is just very Orson Wellish. Then there is the Stanford University Project. Sort of makes you want to put on your radiation and bio-hazard gear before stepping up to this machine.
Not having pockets that deep, I make do with my flat bed scanners... although there are some new planetary scanners coming down the line that are interesting for the home-shop kinda guy. More on that another time. For your edification and entertainment, here are three versions of the same scan from Moxon:
- This is full color, with enhanced contrast to bring up the text:
- This is the same image in Grayscale:
- This is the same image with levels adjusted:
Mighty different, eh? Messing with levels, which is basically messing with foreground, background and middleground. sure changes things. Google and their ilk have fancy software that pretty much auto-detects and adjusts levels according to either preset parameters or to those the operator chooses for the particular book.
The end result, while readable, looks so washed out, at least to me, that I feel as if I am reading an old bill that was left in my jeans, washed, dryed and crumpled up in a little ball at the bottom of the pocket.
I prefer the second type of image. Grayscale. While full color is good for archival copies, all that discoloration from damp, finger prints, peanut butter and jelly, creases and dead bug poop all adds up to a mess. Grayscale, with some adjustments of this thing called Gamma, lessens the background interference and punches up the text. At leat that's how I like it.
So now you know how Google makes those books. I'm sure that question has been eating at you for months, if not years. Please go and dazzle your friends with your new found knowledge and expertise in the arcane world of book scanning.
Till next
Gary
PS: scuse the funny formating. I tried, but three images in a row was just too much for this poor software.
