Digitize textbook

Question

How can I digitize my physics textbook? It's huge and I don't want to cut the spine.

I saw a picture of this: Ion Audio

I want to know what's most important when making my own. I have a digital camera, and I have lights. I was thinking of making a movie of me flipping each page, then just using OCR software (maybe even Acrobat) to get all the words, tables and diagrams.

My questions:

1. Is Acrobat the program of choice once I have the pictures?
2. What (kind of) software can recognize when I flip each page (so each frame can be removed and analyzed by Acrobat-like software). Does software like this exist? Should I just use a stopwatch program?

Answer 1

this would probably be a good start, since its got both hardware and software suggestions. I suspect using a pair of canons + CHDK (since they have simple, DIYable remote triggers+ setting them to to click based off the same trigger as the page turning part of the hardware would be simplest, and there's a few FOSS software suggestions there such as Bindery, DJVUBind, and PDFmaker.

I hate posting links alone, but this is just too complex a project to fit into a single answer