By Andrew Liszewski
Whenever I visited the local copy shop while at University the do-it-yourself photocopy machines were always occupied by groups of engineering students, mass-reproducing their various text books. While I was impressed by their dedication at saving a few dollars, I don’t think I could ever spend hours at a machine monotonously turning pages.
This process though has now become a whole lot easier with the Atiz Book Drive scanner. Feeding you the data via USB 2.0, the device will scan a 500 page book in an hour, automatically turning the pages for you. For those worried about their texts the scanner uses a technology called SoftGlide that supposedly leaves books well preserved and unaffected during the scanning process. In addition to the OCR duties it performs, the BookDrive will also auto-crop and clean up any images as it makes its way through the book.
The Atiz BookDrive will set you back $50,000 so it’s probably just cheaper to buy your assigned textbooks.
Or, as noted elsewhere, build your own for quite a bit less –
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/homemade-book-scanner-156334.php
“Most of this project was constructed with the help of an eraser and Legos. It uses the eraser to act as a grip for the page turner and an upside-down Epson scanner that is hooked up to an average laptop.”