Robotic Speed Reading
from the useful...-if-it-weren't-for-copyrights dept
As librarians are realizing the benefits of digitizing all of their works, they're also discovering what a huge process it is to manually scan books. Character recognition software has certainly improved to the point that it's quite useful, but the issue of manually turning pages is a huge problem. Along comes a robot to the rescue. Apparently, two different companies have designed special book scanning machines that turn the pages for you as they scan - scanning up to 1,000 pages an hour. This, of course, would be much much much more useful if we didn't have draconian copyright laws that meant putting most books in this machine is a criminal act. Update: Oddly, the original story has disappeared from the site just a day after it came out, so here's a slightly different version.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
link is blank for me
[ link to this | view in thread ]
scanning machines / Rocky Mountain News
This -may- be the newspaper's take on the story of a few days ago about the scanner installed at Stanford, currently converting the CSLI archives into digital form. Other interesting projects include Benetech.org in Palo Alto, scanning books for the blind and limited-vision, and the venture MIT and HP put together to digitize the MIT Press backlist, using auto scanners and digital character recognition with a high claimed accuracy.
Our experience at Hidden Knowledge, in digitizing public-domain books for publication as e-books, has been that commercial OCR software is still inadequate and not getting better very fast. OTOH, as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more reasonable to store digital images of the pages, say monochrome at 600 dpi.
Mike
[ link to this | view in thread ]