[plasty]

Here's something that could have publishers quaking in their books: gadget makers continue to look for ways to do for books what the CD ripper did for music.


The CD ripper helped fuel music piracy
online. Will Book Saver and similar
devices do the same for books?

Ion Audio, a company known for helping vinyl-record owners digitize their music, says it will trot out sometime this summer a device called the Book Saver, according to a story on Engadget. Ion said the Book Saver is capable of digitizing a 200-page book in 15 minutes. An owner of a Book Saver, which will likely sell for $150, places a book into the scanning cradle and the device makes color copies in seconds, thanks to two cameras hanging above the book.
"Once converted, the books can quickly be transferred to a computer or e-reader," Ion said on its Web site. "Book Saver is the only device needed to quickly make all your books, comics, magazines, or other documents e-reader compatible."
What the company doesn't mention is that devices such as Book Saver will make it even easier for people to share books online. Ask anyone at the major labels about the rise of file sharing and they typically blame the Internet as well as the inclusion of CD rippers in computers. Ripping music and loading it on to digital music players was a cinch after that.
And like CD rippers, Ion says Book Saver is perfectly legal. The courts have ruled that it's legal for people to make copies of their media for personal use.
Book publishing has wrestled with piracy for years, but one of the reasons the sector hasn't been hit as hard by illegal file sharing as much as the music or film industries is that there isn't an easy way to digitize books. Scanning them is typically labor intensive.
And Book Saver suffers from the same problem. The scanning process on the device, while not as time consuming as the old way, is still nowhere as easy to use as a CD ripper. According to Engadget, there's no automated way to turn pages and an owner needs to lift the device to turn every page.
Book publishers should know that eventually someone or some company, maybe even Ion, will streamline the process.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20028279-261.html?tag=topTechContentWrap;editorPicks

[BlueDragonFire]

Sounds pretty cool. But as far as the page turning I think they just got lazy. Here are just a couple of examples of page turning devices. They could have put something there for it.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4463651.html

Quote:

United States Patent 4463651
A page-turning device comprises a bi-directional drive and a page-turning unit including an arm of crescent shape having an outer convex surface engageable with the underface of the uppermost page on one side of the book center-line for turning same when the unit is driven in one direction, and an inner concave surface engageable with the uppermost page on the other side of the book center-line for turning the page when the unit is driven in the opposite direction. The unit preferably has two (or more) such arms equally spaced about the circumference of the unit. The illustrated device includes two of such page-turning units, one serving to turn the pages and the other serving to pick them up according to the drive direction. Each unit may include a helical recess for pre-loading the pages, or an arcing finger for arcing each page before being engaged by the respective arm.

http://www.plcdev.com/impressive_student_control_projects

Quote:

One is a page turning device using an Automation Direct DL05 and parts that were scavanged from an old dot matrix printer.

And I've seen other types but those 2 were just from a quick googling.

Great idea though!

Peace to you and yours,
Matthew "Dra'Gon" Stohler