Remember the sense of liberation that came from digitizing your CDs and then chucking a decade or two’s accumulation of archaic plastic? James Vasile and Ian Sullivan want to give you that gratification again–this time from rendering into bits your hundreds of pounds of dead trees.
Their invention, on display over the weekend at the HOPE hackers conference in New York: the BookLiberator, a simple contraption of poplar wood, screws, plexiglass, and two mounted digital cameras. Rest a book or magazine on the device’s adjustable base, and set its boxy frame so that the plexiglass spreads the pages flat. Take a picture with each camera, turn the page, and repeat. Before long you’ve created new fodder for your Kindle, iPad, or Sony Reader.
The scanner is quicker than traditional scanners at 15 pages per minute, and the quality of the image is better than with traditional scanners. According to the Journal, “Vasile and Sullivan plan to sell their invention in construct-it-yourself kits for around $120, plus an extra $200 for the pair of cameras–less than 10% of the price, they point out, of advanced book scanning devices.”
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