Book-Digitizing Robots

Makarand writes "Robotic digitization systems are the new help available to complete voluminous scanning tasks. Robots that can turn the pages of books and newspaper volumes and attain scanning speeds of more than 1000 pages/hour are now available. They even use puffs of compressed air to separate sticky pages!"

Current Books?

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

With all this trouble of digitizing books, when the publishers send their books to libraries - do they include digital copies? They really should. Although, I don't know if there's an RIAA equivalent in the literary world but if there is, the idea of giving a digital copy might frighten them. Librarians? Has a publisher ever mentioned digital copies that are in a non-crippled format?

Just like my old teacher

[mike_c999]

Combine this with M$ speech synthesis (Sam) and that could replace my old history teacher.

All he did was dictate notes to us, Very Fast and boring

Scanned pages

[Ed Avis]

This story is a good opportunity to plug some free software you could use to help digitize books.

Stuart Inglis's tic98 [waikato.ac.nz] is a lossless compressor designed for black-and-white scanned documents. It achieves better compression ratios than anything else, or at least it did a couple of years ago. If you have scanned documents to make available online, it's fairly simple to write a CGI script to convert tic98 on the fly to PDF.

Hopefully someone else will reply to this comment with a recommendation of good free OCR software.

Hmm...

[stratjakt]

What do the newspapers, and more likely magazines think of this?

Now the magazine rack at 7-11 will show up on Kazoom and all that.

I mean, comic books or "graphic novels" as the nerds call 'em already get traded freely, but that's because some joker with no life takes a day out of his life to scan and crop each page.

But if you could just take the magazines, stick 'em in this robot, then share 'em, it could hurt the publishing industry the way it's hurt the recording industry.

And everyone will justify it by saying "why should I buy a magazine when it only has one good article and the rest is crap!"

So what measures can we expect to see? Lighter inks, crazier fonts to screw with the robots OCR? Funny paper that makes it hard to flip pages?

I can't wait for digital textbooks

[gnurb]

I did quite a bit of research on a low cost book scanner awhile ago, because the though of not having to lug around a heap of books from class to class is a dream come true. I hope this technology really takes off, and they find a way to make the whole thing a bit smaller/cheaper. I bet textbook publishers are scared silly about this..

This is useful for other professions too

[Anonymous Coward]

A robotic scanning machine for books could be very useful for litgation support too. I work for a company that is an out-source firm for law firms and we get a lot of books to copy and scan. Hand place copying is a pain like you wouldn't believe. This machine could end all of that, only if you had a large enough project to justify buying this machine.

But of course, this would also probably raise the cost to the law firms we have as clients, and of course they would charge their clients more.

Re:Project Gutenberg

[tempestdata]

Well I have some good news for you. While, I was working (and I still am actually) on this project I asked the Digital Library Projects Manager, who is basically in charge of this project about releasing the books they scan to the public. His reply was that they were probably going to release a pretty significant portion of the books they scan to the public. The rest would only be available within Stanford University Libraries.

So, you may at one point see those books freely available for download, provided they can get those copyright issues ironed out.

Destroying books to save them

[shoppa]

The page-turning robots are unique because they do little (or no?) damage to the book to get them digitized.

The more traditional way to preserve the contents of the old books is to destroy them in the process. Actually cutting the page out of the book lets you get a much higher quality scan because the page is then really truly flat. (Yes, there are correction techniques for turning scans of non-flat pages into flat "projections" but they aren't nearly as good as just ripping the page out and scanning it.)

Re:Hard to read on a screen.

[JR]

I often read a great deal of my news and general research on the screen. I do this at a variety of screen resolutions, but often at 1024 x 768 up to 1600 x 1200 always at a refresh of 75 Hertz or higher.

I've made no special adaptations for purity of screen color or gamma.

I have excellent low light vision and wear sunglasses only on the brightest of days or in special circumstances like spending time in high glare situations (on the water, bright sand, snow, etc.).

I've even read entire novels on the comparatively low resolution of an early Palm III. In that instance, the greater annoyance was more the small amount of text per "page" than the quality of the image.

Naivete might be a little soft

[ianscot]

That was my reaction too. You sort of head down the same path, though -- poor people in underdeveloped countries can't "think for themselves"? What do you base this observation on?

Having traveled in subsaharan Africa a bit, I can safely say that people I met there aren't "closed to the idea of democracy." (They're sometimes consciously "closed" to the idea of allowing mammoth, conscience-free American-based multinational corporations to subvert the democratic institutions they do have, though.)

I bet that was just an isolated quote the reporter chose, though. Seems more like her/his bias than the librarians, at first glance.

Better for what?

[rdewald]

Analog is subject to degradation everytime it is reproduced. Digital conversion halts the degradation at conversion. Ones are ones and zeroes are zeroes from then on.

Make them free

[b-baggins]

"We have hunger and want in the world because evil men use the vehicle of government to deny men that liberty which they need to produce abundantly."

Ezra Taft Benson

Make them free, and they'll bring the food and water into their villages themselves.

Alternative to flipping

[Ed Avis]

Instead of picking the book up and flipping the pages, couldn't you use X-ray tomography (or possibly microwave tomography) to get a 3d image of the book and extract pages from that?

This assumes two things: that the ink makes a difference to X-ray penetration compared to just paper, and that the resolution of the scanner is high enough to pick out individual pages. But typical medical scanners are pretty high-res I think. Has anyone tried this?

Another way to scan....

[chippcom]

I seem to remember a few years back, during a tour of MIT's media lab, a project underway to basically MRI scan a closed book, then 'slice and dice' it page by page via some sophisticated algorithms into seperate files which could then be OCR'ed. The plus to this approach, is that for some books, just opening them would damage them beyond all repair.

I thouhgt it a pretty cool idea. Anyone ever heard of this befoe?

-Chipp