News Scientists develop super-fast book scanner

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/03/18/scientists-develop-fast-book-scanner/1

 

You would have to flick the pages perfectly or it wouldn't see all of them and you'd end up with an incomplete copy.

Unless you want to back up all the books in the world onto a database incase of a nuclear Armageddon, I don't see the point of it.

 

Who are the book equivalent of the RIAA? Surely they'll be all over this for 'facilitating the duplication of copyrighted material'.

 

That's the first piece of tech I've seen today that's revolutionary rather than evolutionary. Nicely done! I'm sure only libraries will be interested, but think about one of those mounted on the back of an e-Reader - buy a hardback book, scan it in one minute flat, and then read the real thing at home and the e-Reader on the train. I'm not sure it's useful but it's clever nonetheless.

 

AWESOME!

Is what I'd say if I had an actual use for it. Perhaps not so awesome for me, but it'd sure lead to awesome things coming my way, I guess.

 

Johnny 5 what have you done!

Sounds cool, but I dunno, most books are printed from some form of digital media, so it would be daft to then have something that does it backwards, I guess it would be handy for documenting old stuff that isn't digitised at all (historians and the type).

 

THink about libraries. They could scan there more popular books and e read them out to people. Then they can cut there space inhalf as they only need one copy of everything. Albeit this is possible with online retailers and copyright infringment would be through the roof but its a novel use for it. Plus armagadeon book storage is kind of nice.

 

Very cool setup

 

I'd actually buy one of these if it was <£200 or so.

Some people like music, some people like films, lets say my interest is books and ebooks.

It's all totally illegal of course, the right to copy a book is owned solely by the author and/or the publisher if the author waives copyright, so unless you got explicit permission (you wouldn't) there isn't a legitimate application.

Still, in a few years time there will be more and more torrent sites with pretty much every book ever.

 

. . . wander into a book store and. . . .

seriously, as technology advances the old copyright laws are beginning to look more and more silly. if i buy a book and want to have a digital copy there should be no issue with that, since what i am actually doing is buying the rights to access that material, not just the form factor it is in. i am not saying the creator does not also have rights regarding their work, but we need to consider the fact that digital coping of a work for personal use does not violate the rights of the creator in any way. it simply makes it easier for us to consume.

of course then their is the issue of letting someone else borrow a book that i have digitized. . .

 

I'm with LucusLoC on this one. Anybody expecting me to pay for media that I already own just because it's in a digital format can nom on my proverbials. So Says ED!

 

does the book-flipping method of fast scanning remind you of any thing?

Jonny 5 anyone?

 

Innnputtt!

(You beat me to it!)

 

I foresee an explosion of ebook pdfs with every-second page missing.

 

Good! Now all is left to research is some software to make book digests...

 

Sweet! Can help in other areas such medicin, physics and every kind of molecular, nuclear engineering and bla bla bla, you know

 

Handy if you're blind and need to have the computer screenread things to you.

Still reliant on OCR, of course, but much faster.

 

well, if it works on books what else might it be useful for?

how about motion capture for faces? suddenly you have a way to get minute facial detail for videoconferencing or for using as data for avatars in virtual worlds.


on the security front, I know many people might be uncomfortable with the idea, but if you have a known individual you're trying to pick out of a crowd this camera system might give enough detail to pick out a person even in a large crowd.

 

I already said that!

 

It would be very useful for many pirates out there! Hi pirates!