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

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the paperless-future dept.

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.

5 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Welcome to 2006 by ShooterNeo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Welcome to 2006 by DavidRothman9947 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Thanks, but what about those of us who might prefer nondestructive scanning? Also consider other factors--for example, the speed and quality of the scans, as well as the price. The Czur appears to be several times faster than a $600 model from Fujitsu that allows nondestructive book scans. If you're scanning lots of books, that won't be a trivial detail. As for quality, the Fujitsu is good but not nirvana. Let's see if the Czur will do better.

    2. Re:Welcome to 2006 by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Several comments:

      1 So do VCR's.

      2 Most books are available within a day on multiple sites.

      3 Most books are available within days at libraries.

      4 This only slightly speeds up/makes the process easier. Anything you can read can be transcribed.

      5 80 people can transcribe 80 different books quickly.

      Who knows- they might try- but it seems like a waste of their money to me.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  2. Re:that's like 40 ebooks to break even by jolyonr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  3. Is this a Cloud-only system? by timg11 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.