Scanning System Can Make An E-Book From A Traditional Book In Minutes

Imagine what it would be like to turn your favorite traditional book into an e-book in just a few minutes. If you wanted to take some resource books with you for a project, instead of carrying the physical books, you could spend a very small amount of time digitizing those books. That way, you could just conveniently carry your reader with you instead of a backpack full of books. Being able to make an e-book this fast and easy way would be useful.

A group of professors from the University of Tokyo have come up with a scanning system that can make an e-book by flipping a traditional book in front of a high speed camera. This system could be a way for teachers to tempt the younger generation to read classic authors like Shakespeare. The reason this scanning system can make an e-book so fast is that it can scan 250 – 300 pages per minute. Then it takes that digitized information and puts it in an attractive format for the user to read. This system works about ten times (or more) faster than any other system like it.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the World’s First Bookless Library. Think about what this system could mean for libraries around the world. In a short time (my guess would be a few months), all the books in a large library could be converted into digital format. They could make an e-book out of every one of them. This could be a lot more convenient for readers since right now libraries usually only have a limited selection of e-books. Of course, there are all kinds of copyright implications that go along with doing that I’m sure, but just from the technology standpoint, it’s inspiring! This process is called Book Flipping Scanning, and you can read all the geeky details here at Ishikawa Oku Laboratory.