Nayar saw the Academy Award–winning Born into Brothels, a 2004 documentary film about children living in Calcutta’s red light district who were handed cameras and joyfully taught to reveal the life before their eyes. “The film reaffirmed that the camera is like no other piece of technology,” he said. It raises emotions “both for the person being shot and for the person shooting.”

In January 2009, I made a cheap, simple book scanner and in April I put the complete plans online. Since then, many people have built their own scanners and made incredible improvements. This site is a place where we work together to further the art of DIY book scanners and software.

So, in the best traditions of Heath Robinson and Charles Babbage, I built one:

I didn’t read English well, so I mainly taught myself these things by studying the pictures and diagrams. By the time I saw my first windmill on the cover of an American textbook called Using Energy, I was able to apply all this previous knowledge and set out to build my own.