
Ion's Book Saver personal scanner converts your books to digital - edw519
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/01/at-ces-ions-booksaver-personal-scanner-converts-your-books-to-digital/1
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sandofsky
The scanning process sounds sounds monotonous enough that it isn't worth it
for most books. I'd just shell out the 10 bucks and get a perfect digital copy
from the Amazon store.

However, textbook publishers should be terrified. Imagine if N classmates
agreed to split the cost of one copy. For many college students, the savings
is worth more than a couple hours of free time.

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donw
I have a large number of books that aren't available on Amazon, especially
foreign-language books. If this can produce good-quality images, suitable for
OCR/PDF, then it becomes a lot easier than building my own scanning machine.

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ck2
There should never be any fair use concerns if you own the book.

This is like owning the CD version of an album and making mp3s for your own
use. Despite what the RIAA says now, they once said it was fine and I agree
with that logic for books as well.

However I want a book scanner like Google does it, where there is a laser that
measures the bending of the pages and can flatten the image accordingly based
on the measurements.

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elviejo
Of course you can also hack your own: <http://www.diybookscanner.org/>

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daniel_reetz
Thanks for the mention - we're watching the Ion with interest. It's pretty
obvious that the Ion design is inspired by the DIY book scanner builders out
there (DIYBookScanner, BKRPR).

I hope they do a good job of it. Honestly, I'll be shocked if they meet their
claimed $149 price point and have quality beyond webcam-capture. If they do,
it will be an awesome device, so I hope they do. Also, right now, they claim 7
seconds for two pages, which is a damned eternity.

If anyone has any pet projects that they need motivation or advice to do,
we've got a really active community of book scanners, hackers, and builders
developing new technology daily. If it involves a camera and a book, we've
probably tried it and the locals are quite friendly.

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pontifier
I went to home depot yesterday to get everything I need (except the cameras
which I got a few days ago), and am going to start building my new standard
scanner today... I'm super excited.

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daniel_reetz
Hey pontifier -- that's great! Congratulations! Be sure to check out
clemd973's build thread -- he really worked out a lot of the problems with the
New Standard. Link:
[http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=...](http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=698&start=0)

Also, feel free to email/PM me. danreetz/gmail

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nradov
Does the software include good OCR? If it's just taking a bitmap picture then
it's not very useful. But if it can produce text files with no DRM then I
could read the content on any device.

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haribilalic
You can pick up a copy of AABBYY FineReader from $50. If the software wasn't
able to OCR and generated only images, you could run it through FineReader and
spit out a PDF or text document.

Edit: The website[1] says _"Includes software that automatically detects text
for further editing and archiving"_.

1\. <http://www.ionaudio.com/booksaver>

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xtacy
Google's book scanner apparently uses infrared to detect the orientation of
the page and hence adjust for the position of the page:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_patent_7508978.html)

It's unclear what the speed of the scanning device is though.

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JoshCole
I might be interested in this for some of my heavier books. I got an art
history book for one of my courses earlier, picking it up is like picking up a
gallon of milk. I'm not looking forward to lugging that around between
classes.

I don't think I'll get this though. There is a problem with ebooks that makes
me value paper books. Taking notes. It is so easy to take notes inline and
connect ideas while reading a paper book, but the interface to do the same
sort of thing with an ebook sucks.

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haribilalic
What sort of DPI would be acceptable for an art history book? Their other
document scanners can scan up to 600 DPI.

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jakewalker
Lift and turn makes this just this side of not useful. If they could only get
it to autodetect when the page is turned (no button to press) without having
to lift the entire device on each page turn, they'd really have something.
People will page through a book for 10 or 15 minutes, but they won't lift,
turn, press a button and repeat for an entire book, which will probably take
an hour or more.

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tocomment
This gives me an idea for a startup. A book scanning service. People mail you
a book, you scan it, send them a mobi or PDF file and mail the book back.

You could even scan it for free if they elect to let you keep the book and
resell it.

I'm sure you'd need a good copyright lawyer but maybe the company could start
out under the radar?

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kazuya
Several book scanning services have already been available in Japan for
months, though books are cut and trimmed so that they can be scanned using
automatic feeders.

Usually you pay a dollar or so for ~300 pages, and another for OCR.

> I'm sure you'd need a good copyright lawyer but maybe the company could
> start out under the radar?

Yeah their legality is dubious; I guess they make it in a hit-and-run way.

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AndyParkinson
I could see using this to take old Moleskine notebooks and digitizing them for
long-term reference so I can junk the physical notebook. That kind of info
might be invaluable.

For everything else shelling out $10 for a kindle book seems like a better use
of time and money.

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ZeroGravitas
If you're going to junk the notebook anyway, you can remove the pages by
cutting the spine and then use a standard scanner with a document feeder
attachment.

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light3
Now all that is needed is something that automatically flips pages :)

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akeck
It looks like a small integrated version of Daniel Reetz's scanner.
<http://www.diybookscanner.org/>

