You're omitting the biggest similarity; in "The Diamond Age" Nell starts as a ~4 year-old girl who educates herself with her "primer," essentially an OLPC on steroids.
i.e. The entire book Nell sits and reads her "primer," learning everything she needs to know about her world.
Actually, the motivation behind the project stem's from Dan's stay in Russia before his graduate studies.
He realized that their are tons of old posters, pictures, and other soviet propoganda floating around the country's libraries that many people in the western world would like to view, but are unwilling to go to Russia to see.
He wanted to digitize some of these posters (works of art, in his view) in order to circulate them on the web. He soon became very frustrated with using a flatbed scanner, and stopped.
Zoom ahead a few years later, Instrucatables is having a contest to win an epilog laser cutter, so he decided to build a book scanner out of recycled (read: trash) materials and submits the project, and wins. He says he's surprised at how well the project has resonated with the web community.
The use of 5 MP cameras is more than sufficient for reading the scanned books at any resolution, if you'd bother to check out any of the sample scans he's released on instructables or the diybookscanner website.
Dan chewed on this "problem" of insufficient resolution for a month or so before he did some tests and concluded that digital cameras just plain take better pictures than scanners do, since the technology used in scanners is old and stagnant; while the computing power in these smaller, cheaper digital cameras continues to improve.
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You're omitting the biggest similarity; in "The Diamond Age" Nell starts as a ~4 year-old girl who educates herself with her "primer," essentially an OLPC on steroids. i.e. The entire book Nell sits and reads her "primer," learning everything she needs to know about her world.
Actually, the motivation behind the project stem's from Dan's stay in Russia before his graduate studies. He realized that their are tons of old posters, pictures, and other soviet propoganda floating around the country's libraries that many people in the western world would like to view, but are unwilling to go to Russia to see. He wanted to digitize some of these posters (works of art, in his view) in order to circulate them on the web. He soon became very frustrated with using a flatbed scanner, and stopped. Zoom ahead a few years later, Instrucatables is having a contest to win an epilog laser cutter, so he decided to build a book scanner out of recycled (read: trash) materials and submits the project, and wins. He says he's surprised at how well the project has resonated with the web community.
The use of 5 MP cameras is more than sufficient for reading the scanned books at any resolution, if you'd bother to check out any of the sample scans he's released on instructables or the diybookscanner website. Dan chewed on this "problem" of insufficient resolution for a month or so before he did some tests and concluded that digital cameras just plain take better pictures than scanners do, since the technology used in scanners is old and stagnant; while the computing power in these smaller, cheaper digital cameras continues to improve.
The school is NDSU. Yes we (he) looked. No our library does not have one.
He has details of the reasons on his blog danreetz.com/blog