Aaron Miller has a brief post on the FrontMatters blog about Google’s book digitizing service. You can send in whole boxes of books and get them digitized, OCR'ed, and converted to “a multitude of digital formats.” The only problem, Miller notes, is that the service isn’t available to consumers, but is for publishers only. And it’s not likely that Google will offer it to us, ever. The likely outcome will be that eventually every mouldering tome in our decrepit paper collections will already have been scanned and available — and we’ll have to pay for...

Mediabistro’s GalleyCat has a post about ABBYY FineReader Express, an OCR program that can even use cell phone cameras (though for best results, a 5 megapixel version is recommended, which would seem to limit it to the iPhone 4’s camera). The post mentions it in the context of scanning “orphan works” such as the “hundreds of pages from 1930s novels, periodicals, and self-published materials that couldn't leave the New York Public Library” that GalleyCat editor Jason Boog read through during a project. As a demonstration, it includes a photograph of a page from such a work, a screenshot...

We’ve mentioned ReCAPTCHA a time or two—the security effort by Carnegie Mellon researchers that took two problems and made them solve each other: how to make a “CAPTCHA” (an automated Turing test meant to prove that a human wants to access the website rather than a spambot) that couldn’t be solved by a computer optical character recognizer, and how to digitize words in old documents that a computer’s OCR couldn’t puzzle out. By feeding these unrecognizable words to web users, paired with words the computer knew already, it both tested whether they were real people and told...

Gizmodo has a piece on the BookLiberator, a cube of plexiglass that contains two opposite-facing video cameras to photograph facing pages of a book. You place it on a book, photograph, lift, turn page, place it, etc. Conceptually, this appears similar to the $300 DIY Book Scanner I covered in December—they both use two cameras to snap two facing pages at a time. The BookLiberator looks a little more tedious, comparing the two: with the DIY scanner, you just tilt up a hinged half-cube to turn the page, but with the BookLiberator you have to lift the entire...

Want to use your iPhone to photograph and OCR scan printed matter? Your chance may be coming soon. CNet reports that Creaceed’s Prizmo software, a desktop photo-OCR package that includes camera tethering and perspective correction, will soon be coming to the iPhone. No word yet on price; the desktop version costs $40. The app's crowning feature is that it can fix bad perspective, just like its desktop sibling, as well as let users snap photos without having to press the shutter button. Creaceed has devised a system through which users can simply say "take picture,"...

Thanks to Bookofjoe. Note: TeleRead originally covered this scanner in March....

Publishers Weekly has a piece on Japanese and American manga publishers banding together to oppose “scanlations”—the manga equivalent of animé fansubs, where fans translate and repost manga for the benefit of non-Japanese readers. What they are objecting to is not so much the process itself (which they say has been going on since the ‘70s—have scanners even been around that long?) but a number of “scanlation aggregator” sites that gather together scanlations from all over. They are threatening legal action against 30 scanlation-aggregation sites. According to a spokesperson, these sites are among the most...

TheBookseller.com has a piece from the London Book Fair looking at opposition to the idea of “enhanced” e-books. Karolina Sutton, senior agent at Curtis Brown, expresses concern that only “superbooks” will get the expensive enhanced treatment, leaving midlist authors out in the cold. She is also concerned that the “gimickiness […] distracts from the actual word.” Also from the London Book Fair, Publishing Perspectives brings a look at comic books as iPhone and iPhone apps, as well as discussion of what the best way to translate comic books to such a format might be. Comic book creators are...

Remember that $300 do-it-yourself rapid e-book scanner I mentioned in my post the other day about ethics and legality? Instructables has gone that scanner one better, with instructions for building a $20 photographic-scanning rig. The entry describes creating a roughly pyramidal framework out of hardware including tie rods, angle brackets, and shelf tracks. Into the framework one mounts a digital camera, which is then used to take photos of the book between turning the pages. While not as sophisticated as the $300 model, the simplicity and economy of this approach is nonetheless remarkable and may still very...

I first heard about this story via Mike Shatzkin in a lengthy piece at his Idea Logical blog, then in a shorter piece by Mike Masnick at TechDirt. Since then, I’ve seen it crop up in a number of different places, and it’s just too beguiling an issue not to discuss. An ethicist at the New York Times, Randy Cohen, has opened a can of worms and dumped them all over e-books with a column in which he suggests it is ethically fine to download an electronic copy of a book (in this case, a book that was not yet...

The new scanner, made by book2net, is the only one of its kind in the US, but there are others in Canada at two other locations. The machine, originally designed for use in the reading rooms of the British Library, was manufactured in Germany. It can capture a JPEG image of an entire newspaper page (or comic book, folio, book, bound volume, etc.) in 0.3 seconds, and it needs only 1.9 seconds of cycling time to scan another page. The scanner has a touchscreen that allows a person to view details close-up, and all it takes to scan a...