I was looking into similar products when I found http://booksorber.com/
I already have the DSLR, tripod and floodlight so it was the natural choice for me. I guess this one is good if you have none of that.
Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
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Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#12"Build your own digital library"? For a single book, sure, makes sense, but this totally doesn't scale. Perhaps a nice gadget to have at a hackerspace, but then again you can probably just build this yourself.
This depends very much on your time/money tade-off, as well as the availability of texts, and the opportunities for sharing of scanned works.
In many cases,books are nonlonger in print, scanning is among the few ways to get a copy. Or you need a small number of works to fill out a library which is otherwise available online. Services such as Library Genesis make sharing works among individual scanners and scanner communities far easier.
For regions of the world with little access to printed materials, tools such as this are a godsend.
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#13This will all come down to the software. the folks at http://www.diybookscanner.org/ have been using point and shoot digital cameras to make scanners for years so the hardware isn't the problem. The problem is the OCR and dealing with page curl. Without something to flatten the page, the quality of OCR goes down a lot. The video says they have solved it but I am skeptical. Good OCR software like Omnipage or Finereader usually sells for over $100 to start with and they don't do that well with curved pages so if this product really can then it would be worth the $200 to someone serious about book scanning. I would have to see some real proof that they can do high accuracy OCR before spending money on it though.
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#14For a far more impressive scanner, developed by a Google engineer and including automated page turning see: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scan... I believe there is a far more detailed breakdown of the project floating around somewhere. It is possible, but not clear to me, that Google use this for their own book scanning project - Google Books.
Jason Scott says it destroys books: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4695
Ok... and is there some place where he explains why he believes that to be the case? The Google presentation explicitly mentions that a feature of the scanner is that it doesn't destroy books.
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#15Next time they probably shouldn't use The Sound and the Fury as an example book. It's got quite a few n-words scattered throughout the text that happen to show up in the video.
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jason Scott says it destroys books: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4695
Ok... and is there some place where he explains why he believes that to be the case? The Google presentation explicitly mentions that a feature of the scanner is that it doesn't destroy books.
There's really nothing to go on except the small quip from the author, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which the machine has no way of adjusting for more delicate sources.
Watching the video from http://linearbookscanner.org on how the scanner works, I'm guessing the "doesn't destroy books" pitch is a response to other scanners where you're supposed to slice off the spine of the book and feed the cut pages into it. Given that it's just a vacuum pulling the pages through a slit in the apparatus, I can easily imagine much more delicate texts getting torn pretty easily using the device.
The FAQ on the Linear Book Scanner page itself admits that it does have restrictions on the type of pages and book dimensions it can work with, and that it has a relatively high damage rate (from the aforementioned website FAQ, "Out of 50 books tested, 45% had one or two of their pages either torn or folded.")
The LBS is probably fine for more modern texts that just haven't been digitized, but I too would be wary about automating any rare or delicate text.
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#17another option that's roughly $1 for 100 pages:
http://1dollarscan.com/pricing.php
This is a good option depending on your needs (e.g., only select books, smaller collection, you don't want to do any of the work, etc.)
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#18In the Cruz video there is a quick mention of a cloud service. Is the OCR'ing done in the cloud? Is the cloud necessary for the operation of the scanner? There is no need to spell out the privacy and security implications if that is the case.
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#19another option that's roughly $1 for 100 pages: http://1dollarscan.com/pricing.php This is a good option depending on your needs (e.g., only select books, smaller collection, you don't want to do any of the work, etc.)
Hm - interesting. What stops students from sending in their textbooks to have scanned and shared with fellow students?
Re: Scan a book in five minutes? $199 ‘Smart scanner’ with foot pedal and WiFi
#20This will all come down to the software. the folks at http://www.diybookscanner.org/ have been using point and shoot digital cameras to make scanners for years so the hardware isn't the problem. The problem is the OCR and dealing with page curl. Without something to flatten the page, the quality of OCR goes down a lot. The video says they have solved it but I am skeptical. Good OCR software like Omnipage or Finereade…
I have seen page-curl solved with two high-megapixel cameras; you can use parallax on the text to create a 3d-map of the page from which correcting page curl is quite easy to do. The problem is that you lose resolution in the highly-curled areas, so while a 1-2MP camera is plenty for perfectly flat pages, 16-20MP is better for non-flat scans.