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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.
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
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.