Cheap Camera for Document Copying

I want to machine translate giant archaeology journal collections of soviets.
One of the libraries of Istanbul have them and they only accept camera to the library and not want to photocopy them.

I need a digital EXTREMELLY CHEAP camera to take page photographs and carry to pdf with OCR at computer.

I calculated that there are 300 000 pages.

Luckily I dont have money but may be little bit and wait your suggestions.

It must be extremelly cheap and sharp. May be 50 dollars or less , online shopping with credit card , non american electricity but european , giant memory and prefer AA cells , USB plug.

Umut

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:

I want to machine translate giant archaeology journal collections of soviets.
One of the libraries of Istanbul have them and they only accept camera to the library and not want to photocopy them.

I need a digital EXTREMELLY CHEAP camera to take page photographs and carry to pdf with OCR at computer.

I calculated that there are 300 000 pages.

Luckily I dont have money but may be little bit and wait your suggestions.

It must be extremelly cheap and sharp. May be 50 dollars or less , online shopping with credit card , non american electricity but european , giant memory and prefer AA cells , USB plug.

Umut

Click to expand...

Umut,

There is no such camera new for $50. Perhaps you should seek a local sponsor to finacially underwrite your project.

Don Bryant

Umut,
not to discourage you, but even if you can manage to scan and convert with an OCR - which certainly is going to require some work, some manual intervention - 200 pages per day, you will need 1500 days to complete the work. That's more than five years of work.

After you'll have endured the heroic fatigue* of doing all this work, I don't think you will be able to derive any financial gain from it because the content is probably going to be protected by copyright anyway (around 50 years after the death of the author if memory serves) and most countries in the world adhere to international copyright treaties.

I would think there probably is a better way to spend one's youth on.

Taking pictures of a document with a camera and then scanning with an OCR is probably very hard to do. You should need a vertical stand, proper lighting, and a lot of quality in your images.

Fabrizio

* Paraphrasing a line from the foreword of Manzoni's Betrothed.