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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.
You've been able to do this for years and years a different way.
1. Get a sheet fed scanner like a Fujitsu Snapscan ($400)
2. Cut the binding off the book
3. Place the stack of pages into the scanner
4. Get a coffee
And you're done, the thing's 600 DPI and does both sides in the same pass. It creates a PDF directly, and you then want to OCR the PDF, running a sharpen filter on the text, and decide on how much you want to compress the PDF. A 1000 page textbook ends up being about 700 megabytes, in crystal clear quality.
"Strangely, most people seem to disagree with that very idea. Reading not convenient on electronic devices. Paper still is the best medium for books. If I have the book, why would I want to read it digitally?"
Because you can select the typeface, the font size, the border, there's built-in bookmarks, there's a search function where you can jump from place to place containing the search expression, there's a built-in word explanation/translation/wikipedia search built-in, you can highlight passages without damaging the book, you can synchronize it with the reader on the toilet, so that you read the exact same book also there, but the reader can stay in the bathroom and lots of other things.
Hint: That's why thousands of bookstores are closed, because people prefer eBooks over paper ones.
There are a lot of things that simply aren't available on ebooks. And if I purchased the book and I'm using the pdf for my own use then it's not piracy. At least it's not morally wrong to me, and that's the only thing that matters as far as I am concerned.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Okay, let's do this. I'll drop my book from a height of ten feet. You do the same with your book reader.
The previous, less durable model of my reader survived drops from all angles at realistic heights.
Ok, lets try this: I'll dunk my ebook reader under water (or spill coffee on it). You do the same with your dead tree book.
Or how about this: I'll toss my ebook reader into my luggage. You do the same with your dead tree book and see if you don't bend pages and corners.
Or how about this: I'll leave my ebook reader sitting around, collecting dust. You do the same with your dead tree book and see if the pages don't get damaged by oxygen, sunlight, dust or humidity.
Also, when you damage a book, you've damaged one book. When you break your reader, you've lost *all* your books.
When you damage dead tree books, those books are gone forever. When I break my reader, I can get a new reader and restore my whole library from backup.
The indigogo site says "Your sketches, paintings, and notes can be scanned and stored in the Czur cloud".
Do we have the option to use our choice of server (maybe local)?
What if I don't want everything that I scan going to a company in China?
What if one day the "Czur cloud" is gone - is the scanner then unusable?
Has anybody tracked down these answers? The product seem appealing if non-cloud, independent operation is allowed.