Scanner Could Let You 'Rip' Books

clipped from www.technovelgy.com Scanner Could Let You 'Rip' Books A prototype device uses a high-speed camera to record the pages that are revealed when you flip through a book, and then uses special software to digitize the book's contents. By using a high-speed camera that shoots at 500 frames per second, lab workers Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe can scan a 200-page book in under a minute. You just hold the book under the camera and flip through the pages as if shuffling a deck of cards. The camera records the images and uses processing power to turn the odd-shaped pictures into flat, rectangular pages on which regular OCR (optical character recognition) can be performed. If this device could be commercialized, it would let you 'rip' a book in the same sense as you can rip a CD, digitizing its contents for easy storage on your computer. described with book-torturing glee by Vernor Vinge in his excellent 2006 novel Rainbows End