Google's Book Scanning Technology Revealed 100
blee37 writes "Last March we discussed Google's patent for a rapid book scanning system. This article describes and provides pictures of how the system works in practice. Google is secretive, but the system's inner workings were apparently divulged by University of Tokyo researchers who wrote a research article on essentially identical technology. There are also videos of robotic page flippers and information about how Google wants to use music to help humans flip pages."
MRI technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
I often wondered if it would be possible for a book to be scanned while closed, using some kind of MRI technology that digitally sliced the book page by page, picking up on the density difference between the ink and the paper slice by slice.
Build your own.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply set up a rig with 2 digital cameras and a plexiglass V to photograph 2 pages at a time. It's quite fast and cheap.
http://www.diybookscanner.org/ [diybookscanner.org]
Works great. I built one to turn a couple of rare automotive books into PDF so I dont damage a $180.00 book in the garage.
We used to call them "Service Bureaus" (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when we called them "Service Bureaus" book scanning was fast, easy, and cheap, as long as you didn't want the book back.
You deliver your book, magazine, phone book, map, large format document, or whatever to a Service Bureau.
They will then use a paper saw and cut the binding off and the other three sides to make perfectly smooth edges.
Then they put the whole mess into a hopper. The hopper feeds the pages to a scanner.
When it's done, flip the pile over and put it back into the hopper to get the odd-numbered pages into the scanner.
What you get back is your original book (as a pile of pages with no binding) and a CD-ROM of its contents in both original TIFF and OCRd text files. Now you can get them as PDF/A and DejaVu formats.
I suppose Google's point is that they don't want to ruin the books, or maybe they are so proud of their 3D-scanner enough to use it at all costs. But think of this: there are usually several thousands, perhaps millions, of copies of the books I've seen in Google's library, so destroying one copy of the book seems fair enough.
Re:Build your own.... (Score:5, Interesting)
What idiot would use a $1800 laptop in the garage to view a PDF?
Let me guess, you change your oil wearing a cashmere sweater and silk shirts as well.
Nope. I risk my $40.00 fujitsu tablet PC that views pdf's just fine but has not enough Horsepower to do much else. works awesome as a garage PC to read PDF's and read the engine codes with my RS232-ODBII scanner/logger.
Re:MRI technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for finding the boundaries between books in a stack, if a scanner can scan pages in a closed book, I think it will have little trouble separating the books.
Re:MRI technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't verified this, but my father-in-law told me the guy that invented the MRI wanted to develop it as a medical scanner to the point where it was cheap enough that everybody could afford it. Then GE et al locked up the idea and turned it into a profit center.
Re:MRI technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
The downside of liquid helium is that it's damned expensive, and getting more so by the minute. Running at full capacity I could blow through several thousand liters in a year, and at several dollars a liter minimum plus overhead, that's real money. As a bonus, lately our supplier of helium has become incredibly unreliable, missing orders and generally flaking out, while simultaneously raising prices because of actual production shortages. I just had to read the sales guy the riot act, and if service doesn't improve darn fast, we'll take our business elsewhere, as will the other users on campus. (Helium comes from the radioactive decay of uranium and other alpha emitters deep in the earth, and comes out of natural gas wells.) The long-term solutions are (a) set up as many cryogen-free systems as possible, and (b) get a helium liquifier to recycle the helium that we do use. Unfortunately, (a) requires an upfront cost comparable to about 8 years of a system's helium consumption per system, and (b) also necessitates big capital expenses as well as an ongoing maintenance issue. Of course none of these kinds of costs are the sort of thing that it's easy to convince a funding agency to support. Too boring and pedestrian.
By the way, I spend most of my days on site at the largest US particle accelerator. Let me know if you'd like to chat with the cryo dept. about how much the tankers of liqiud helium cost ;)
Re:MRI technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
I never heard the story but you might be confusing MRI with X-Ray machines. You might also remember the stories about X-Rays in shoe stores and why that wasn't a good idea.
But either way, the costs are not unrealistically high, you can pick up a used MRI machine for about a 100k. GE doesn't have a monopoly on MRI's, Siemens, Hitachi and a few others make them as well. The simple physics alone however would not allow an MRI machine for most people though. The magnets involved are just too strong that they become dangerous when any metal is brought in the room (see MRI safety videos for examples of the missile effect). The higher powered machines (1.5T and up) require high-power, supercooled magnets which draws a lot of power from the grid (about 100A or the maximum capacity of the average house installation). Of course afterwards you might need to be able to interpret them so you'll still need a doctor familiar with your MRI system as even the simplest images can have artifacts that are easily misinterpreted.
Re:We used to call them "Service Bureaus" (Score:3, Interesting)
That's insufficiently destructive.
They should use the method from Vernor Vinge's novel "Rainbow's End", where the books are fed into what is essentially a giant chipper/shredder. The shredded pages are then blown through a tunnel studded with cameras, swirled around so that every side of every piece of paper is photographed at some point, and then all of the images are reassembled to form complete images of every page. At the end of the tunnel is an incinerator which burns the shredded paper.
The books are gone.