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High-speed scanning wrinkle: Boost for Google? And maybe digital pirates, too, eventually?
August 20, 2009 | 5:56 am
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By David Rothman
Imagine scanning and capturing book pages at 1,000 frames per second. That’s what a new Japanese robotic gizmo can do—or at least the camera part can keep up.
Catches? Maybe. Does the page flipping itself really go that fast? We don’t know.
Still, even if the flipping happens at a fraction of 1,000 pages a second, that might be major news.
More details, let’s hope, are on the way. If nothing else, we know of one wrinkle, a system to compensate for distortion in the images of the pages as they’re flipped.
Once way or another, this tech out of Tokyo U could be good news for Google or maybe—in time—digital pirates well beyond the reach of either cops or DRM. Just don’t try this baby on any Gutenberg Bibles, huh?
(From the Plastic Pals robot-related blog via E-Reads.)
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Comments:
I find it hard to believe that you could turn the pages of a book at the rate of 1,000 pages per second. The camera may in fact be able to capture 1,000 frames per second, but scanning a book at that rate is a completely different story.
Think of the timing issues involved with the capture, the camera and page turning need to be in sync, not to mention the book would need to be opened up to allow for the capture of both pages simultaneously, or two cameras would need to be employed which would allow for less stress on the spine of the book the way Kirtas Technologies does it. Their latest automatic book scanner can do 3,000 pages per hour at an extremely high quality. http://www.kirtas.com to see KABIS at work.
It occurs to me that we’re getting closer and closer to the “destructive digitizing” method described in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, in which a library’s worth of books are put through a wood chipper and the shreds are blown through a tunnel lined with CCDs, to be stitched together jigsaw-puzzle-style by computers for OCR.
All the same, I can’t help wondering if such a method will ever actually be needed. By the time we do, we’ll probably have scanned everything already—and it suggests a loss of value of deadtreebooks to the point where they are regarded as disposable (which I doubt will happen in my lifetime).
This reminds me of a book I read by Vernor Vinge called “Rainbows End” where all the world’s books are being digitized and the print editions destroyed. This leads to an ‘uprising’ by an older generation that attempts to sabotage the expensive equipment.