Scan a Book In Five Minutes With a $199 Scanner? (teleread.com)

New submitter David Rothman writes: Scan a 300-page book in just five minutes or so? For a mere $199 and shipping — the current price on Indiegogo — a Chinese company says you can buy a device to do just that. And a related video is most convincing. The Czur scanner from CzurTek uses a speedy 32-bit MIPS CPU and fast software for scanning and correction. It comes with a foot pedal and even offers WiFi support. Create a book cloud for your DIY digital library? Imagine the possibilities for Project Gutenberg-style efforts, schools, libraries and the print-challenged as well as for booklovers eager to digitize their paper libraries for convenient reading on cellphones, e-readers and tablets. Even at the $400 expected retail price, this could be quite a bargain if the claims are true. I myself have ordered one at the $199 price.

Comments

Perhaps this entry should be marked as an Ad

[Rob Lister]

Since this product gets free placement here at /., I figure it is okay to put in a word for the good folks at Distributed Proofreaders.

Books are scanned and [sometimes roughly] OCR'd.
Each and every word, period, hyphen, and ellipsis on each and every page is scrutinized by at least three proofreaders.
Each bold, italic, underline and indent is evaluated by at least two formatters.
The work is finalized in HTML, proofread as a whole, and published to Project Gutenberg in various formats, txt, pdf, html and epub.

The resulting publication typically has far fewer publishing errors than the original book. This is especially true of books from the 17th century where drinking was part of a typesetter's expectation.
Be a part of it.
Sign up at http://www.pgdp.net/c/

Re:CCD on a stick

[naughtynaughty]

A digital camera on a tripod PLUS ... Proper lighting Foot pedal interface Lots of software to take the pictures, manipulate the images and stitch them all together into an eBook So a bit more than just a digital camera and a tripod

Re:reading

[Chris Mattern]

Hint: That's why thousands of bookstores are closed, because people prefer eBooks over paper ones.

No, thousands of bookstores are closed because people can select from a much wider selection from Amazon. Paper book sales increased 2.4% last year.

Re:Finally a foot pedal for hands free application

[aitikin]

The only reason devices that can display printed sheet music like tablets and e-ink readers are not popular is that they are essentially useless for sight reading. A foot pedal for page turns could easily create a reader for musicians. It would catch on like wild fire and the music publishers could finally start to distribute good editions again. I have been saying this for years and no one listens, it is the usual routine with industry not seeing the forest for the trees that are still being cut to print music.

You clearly have done zero research. There's a number of options, the most popular I've come across is the AirTurn, although the Cicada works well too from what I've heard.