Comrades, I just got an old 80s theory book from an older comrade as a gift and you’re lucky to even find a used print-version anywhere, let alone a pdf version. Even the title of the book itself yields a handful of results at most. So I thought: This shit needs to be digitized.

Thing is, I don’t have it in me to pull this thing apart just to scan it. Scanning via phone is suboptimal in my experience and doesn’t yield the best results to read on a kindle/pdf-reader. I’d be willing to just retype the thing, but at 300 pages that’s quite the workload too.

Is there a good way to do this that’s not super out there, expensive or time consuming?

  • @CriticalResist8A
    2•1 year ago

    Well, we have a German version of prolewiki but we’re definitely working on the English version first before worrying too much about the others. We could still upload it on that instance though if it comes in text format.

    Awesome! Definitely a worthwhile tutorial, because I suspect comrades all around the world have hundreds of books and other materials like this that got lost in archives somewhere and never made it to the web.

    Part of my revamping of the library is to find a way for people to upload books without necessarily having an account, as getting an account is a whole process of answering thorough questions. We’re bouncing around ideas so that people can submit properly-formatted books to us (either in Word or Google Docs, it’s transferable to MediaWiki 1:1) in a way that is safe for us (not exposed to spam and viruses). To be honest I don’t know much about book scanning but I figure there’s other tutorials I can use to write my guide and cover most cases lol