Google Engineers Open Source Book Scanner Design 69
c0lo writes "Engineers from Google's Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced (about $1500) book scanner on Google Code. Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner was developed by engineers during the '20 percent time' that Google allocates for personal projects. The license is highly permissive, thus it's possible the design and building costs can be improved. Any takers?"
Adds reader leighklotz: "The Google Tech Talk Video starts with Jeff Breidenbach of the Google Books team, and moves on to Dany Qumsiyeh showing how simple his design is to build. Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it? Or maybe the just want to up-stage the Internet Archive's Scanning Robot. Disclaimer: I worked with Jeff when we were at Xerox (where he did this awesome hack), but this is more awesome because it saves books."
Re:Google's motivation (Score:3, Informative)
"Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it?"
The Google Books team is not Google. It's a a group of people, some of whom built this non-destructive reader. It's quite likely these people, who probably love books, started by wondering if there was a way they could scan their content without damaging them physically, and decided to use their 20% time to figure it out.
As for scanning books, that is most definitely a Google-the-company supported project, which they've put a lot of company resources into, including going to bat in the courts to defend the project.