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By Branko Collin

Most book readers are based on the assumption that people will want to use them to, you know, read books. But book reading is such a rare activity, even for avid book readers, that a device designed solely for that purpose and at a price point significantly higher than that of a single p-book is likely to fail. This is why Irex’s Iliad is popular among those that intend to use it for 200-dollar textbooks.

What’s more, a device intended solely for reading ignores the reality that once people have texts in digital form, they will want to interact with them: search, copy, annotate, reshape.

Even if there were such a device (take an Irex Iliad, replace Bloatux by something leaner, exchange the E Ink screen for an energy-efficient LCD screen, and sell it to me for 300 bucks!), it still might not be popular. People will want to read the books they already own on it.

So what we need is a device that will let us digitize our p-books quickly. Not everybody will need to digitize all of their books; the file-sharing networks will make sure that you can access the more popular books you own. Also, you will typically digitize on a need-to-have basis: textbooks for the next semester, novels for the holidays, et cetera.

I’ve got dibs on the name Parrot for this system. The parrot is an animal that can mimic (copy) our words faithfully, and it is also the familiar of choice for pirates.

So what should such a system achieve? It should be able to quickly scan books, OCR the scans, and crank out an e-text. Failing that, it should be able to quickly scan books, and OCR the scans to crank out an index. Failing even that, readable scans would be nice.

Seventy-seven percent of TeleRead readers would digitize their personal libraries if the time required to do so would be an hour or less per book. That is already an achievable goal: assuming a book has 300 pages, the required speed would translate to 12 seconds a page. Most flatbed scanners scan at 15 seconds per page or faster; orbital scanners can reach speeds of 2 seconds a page.

This week I bought a Canon Powershot A620 with which I scanned a 240 page book in (paperback size, scans in full color, and at approximately 400 dpi) in about 30 minutes, well within the time TeleRead visitors are comfortable with. An OCR run would add another five minutes or so. The A620 is Canon’s older low-end consumer model that will hook up to a Windows PC or Mac. The software allows you to automatically shoot pages at a 7-second interval (go faster and the camera won’t have time to refocus and store the image on the PC), so that all the human operator needs to do is to turn the pages. Seven seconds is no luxury; sometimes the pages will stick together, and you will need all the time you’ve got to turn them.

(Not that overshooting is a problem; just remove the extraneous scans before you “compile” your book.)

I want to explore scanning by camera further. Having a portable scanning station removes the factor “location” from the equation; no longer will the book have to be in the same location as my computer, it will be sufficient if I am in the same location as the (rare, unborrowable) book.

It may be interesting to know in this respect that Atiz, makers of (relatively) cheap orbital scanners, have a test page on their Web page in which they announce their Snapter software for using a digital camera as a scanner. From their announcement: “With Snapter, you don’t need scanners anymore. Your digital camera now becomes a better tool to scan a document than an actual scanner. Snapter makes digital camera images look like they come out from a scanner in seconds.”

What would your Parrot System look like?

 
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