Ion's Book Saver personal scanner converts your books to digital

The scanning process sounds sounds monotonous enough that it isn't worth it for most books. I'd just shell out the 10 bucks and get a perfect digital copy from the Amazon store.

However, textbook publishers should be terrified. Imagine if N classmates agreed to split the cost of one copy. For many college students, the savings is worth more than a couple hours of free time.

There should never be any fair use concerns if you own the book.

This is like owning the CD version of an album and making mp3s for your own use. Despite what the RIAA says now, they once said it was fine and I agree with that logic for books as well.

However I want a book scanner like Google does it, where there is a laser that measures the bending of the pages and can flatten the image accordingly based on the measurements.

Of course you can also hack your own: http://www.diybookscanner.org/

Does the software include good OCR? If it's just taking a bitmap picture then it's not very useful. But if it can produce text files with no DRM then I could read the content on any device.

Google's book scanner apparently uses infrared to detect the orientation of the page and hence adjust for the position of the page: http://www.npr.org/blogs/library/2009/04/the_granting_of_pat...

It's unclear what the speed of the scanning device is though.

I might be interested in this for some of my heavier books. I got an art history book for one of my courses earlier, picking it up is like picking up a gallon of milk. I'm not looking forward to lugging that around between classes.

I don't think I'll get this though. There is a problem with ebooks that makes me value paper books. Taking notes. It is so easy to take notes inline and connect ideas while reading a paper book, but the interface to do the same sort of thing with an ebook sucks.

Lift and turn makes this just this side of not useful. If they could only get it to autodetect when the page is turned (no button to press) without having to lift the entire device on each page turn, they'd really have something. People will page through a book for 10 or 15 minutes, but they won't lift, turn, press a button and repeat for an entire book, which will probably take an hour or more.

This gives me an idea for a startup. A book scanning service. People mail you a book, you scan it, send them a mobi or PDF file and mail the book back.

You could even scan it for free if they elect to let you keep the book and resell it.

I'm sure you'd need a good copyright lawyer but maybe the company could start out under the radar?

I could see using this to take old Moleskine notebooks and digitizing them for long-term reference so I can junk the physical notebook. That kind of info might be invaluable.

For everything else shelling out $10 for a kindle book seems like a better use of time and money.

Now all that is needed is something that automatically flips pages :)

It looks like a small integrated version of Daniel Reetz's scanner. http://www.diybookscanner.org/