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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.
The actual big news here: The company doing the indiegogo is located in Shenzhen, China.
This is the first one of these I've seen. It struck me as very odd that the video narrator was an almost perfect midwest accent, but had terrible grammar and word choice, but when looking at the location of the startup, it became more obvious that this was actually an Indiegogo out of China.
Anyway, good on them; I expect that we will be seeing a lot more people doing crowd-sourcing from non-U.S. locations, given that VC thends to be pretty tight outside of specific regions of the U.S. (which is, in turn, why most startups that go anywhere are U.S. based, rather than being in Europe, or elsewhere, where the funding climate is pretty terrible).
It's simply easier to read the PDF although the file size is enormous and you're basically looking at images of some yellowing old book which means lots of panning and zooming particularly on small devices. And forget reading it on an e-reader.
So yeah I think you could automate scanning of books, but the second step of getting it into EPUB format is the tricky part.
Forget everything you assume about whether or not there is a market for large format e-readers. Categorically there is
Categorically? Have you done any market research? Or are you just projecting your own desire (so strong that you've essentially posted off-topic to bring it up) onto everyone else, because you can't imagine why they wouldn't want the same thing?
A large format e-reader would be considerably heavier than a few dozen pages of sheet music. Yes, it could store more data, but that's not really going to be of much use to someone playing a fixed set. You can't fold it down the middle to save space. You can't make arbitrary notes on it. It (probably) doesn't photocopy too well to share with your fellow musicians (and you certainly couldn't put it into a feeder and leave it to copy while you make a cup of tea). It would probably be disproportionately expensive as well, since you would not be manufacturing them in the kind of numbers they make, for example, Kindle Paperwhites in - imagine the costs of equipping an entire orchestra. Page turns would have to be faster, and that black-white refresh would be a hell of a distraction. E-readers - last time I checked - are still not quite as bright or as crisp as printing on actual paper. And e-readers, reliable as they are, still have failure modes. The battery can run out, or simply fail. The footpedal is a separate mechanical device that can fail. Paper doesn't have a failure mode, apart from being actively destroyed.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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/
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
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
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.
"Any digital camera on a tripod can do the same thing."
Both of the smartphone OSes have apps for that, and they perform just as well as a digital camera on a tripod, and rival a good flatbed. Back in the nineteen hundreds, if I wanted to save an article I was reading at the library, I had to check out the volume and bring it home, or bring it to the reserve librarian, who would make a not-very-good paper copy for me at a buck a page - assuming that some horrible copyright objection wasn't raised.
Now, wherever I might be, I just whip out my iPhone and run JotNot, which snaps a picture of each page and saves it as a PDF, just like a flatbed scanner. I love living in the future!
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.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
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.
Video cameras don't have high enough resolution to produce good quality scans of printed material. A standard 300dpi scan of an 8.5 x 11" sheet of paper results in 8.5m pixels. This particular device claims it has 16m pixels which would be about right to be able to cover a scanning surface area that appears to be bigger than an 8.5 x 11" sheet. Another approach might be to detect when a page has been turned using a low resolution video sensor and using that to trigger the higher resolution camera.
You still have to turn pages manually, I had expected they would have automated that (well, perhaps better if you still want to return the book to the library later).
Any digital camera on a tripod can do the same thing.
Heck. Get a fine tooth saw blade and separate the pages from the spine, then load them into a scanner with a page feed.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.