Five years ago we built our first book scanner from salvage and scrap. Book digitization was the domain of giants — Microsoft and Google. Commercial book scanners cost as much as a small car. Unless you chose to destroy your books in sheet-feed or flatbed scanners, there was no safe and affordable way to preserve the contents of your bookshelf on your e-reader.

Collectively, we tried to fix that. Over 2,000 people contributed more than 350 designs and thousands of lines of code at diybookscanner.org.

The result is the Archivist — the VW Beetle of book scanners — cheap, durable, and tremendously effective. It’s open source and made with the simplest materials possible, like plywood, bungees, and skateboard bearings. As fast as you can turn the pages, the Archivist photographs them automatically and creates a zip file of the entire book, for conversion to the e-book format of your choice.

Here’s how you can make your own. We want to see one in every community, starting with hackerspaces. This document shows you how to put together the Archivist kit, which has some nice features that are a little tough to DIY; where appropriate, we’ll fill in DIY approaches.

How DIY book scanning works: