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How do books get digitized? This is how.
February 12, 2009 | 11:41 am
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By Paul Biba
Ever wonder how an e-book is made? I have, and recently Kirtas Technologies sent me an email about their products. While it is highly unlikely I will be buying any of their stuff for my personal use, I found their website absolutely fascinating. They have animations of the digitizers actually turning the pages of the books. If you are a gadget freak like me you will definitely want to take a look.
I had no idea of the resolution of these scans – well they aren’t really scans, they are photographs. Just take a look at these specs:
The APT 2400RA™ is equipped with two 21.1 megapixel EOS-1Ds Mark III Canon digital cameras. They photograph each right- and left-hand page simultaneously through the cameras’ Canon 24-70mm Zoom EF lenses. Resolution can be set to 330 or 400 pixels per inch, with the potential to interpolate to as high as 600 dpi through companion software.
They also have a You Tube video of the machine in action. I hate to say it, but I want one.
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Comments:
You know, its a lot simpler to cut the spine off a book and feed it through a sheet-fed scanner like the Canon 9080c (which sells for ~$6k). This big gizmo is for high-end library conservation projects where the book must remain intact.
Check this out: http://diy.atiz.com/
I nearly bought one a year or so ago. It’s pretty reasonably priced ($2K +/- as I recall). Also they sell software called “Snapter” which allows any digital camera to provide images that can be converted to appear as scanned documents. It works pretty well and if one only has a few books they want to convert it is an option.
Cutting the spine off of books is one thing but there are lots of documents that are to big (e.g. newspapers) to be fed via sheet fed scanners or are just too delicate to take a chance being fed that way.