I’ve seen portable scanners before, but never one so basic in form.

The O King book scanner takes portability to a new high. It comes with an optional plastic back plate, but the scanner can be used without it. The scanner itself folds in half, and is basically a 2MP webcam. There’s a USB port on its base where you’ll need to connect it to a computer.  The scanner costs $120.

Do you know what it would be good for? It’s small enough when collapsed that you can carry it in your luggage without serious penalty. You could bring this to trade shows and use it to scan all the handouts you get. On the other hand, who has the time?

Also, 2MP is rather low these days. You can do better than that with an average smartphone.

via Oh Gizmo!

The open source scanning utility Book Scan Wizard got an update in the past few days, and the update brought a rather interesting feature. You can now use Book Scan Wizard to make a PDF and then upload it to the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive is intended to be an Internet library. It offers permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. It’s collections now include texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages.

One of the things the IA can do is to take a copy of the scanned book uploaded by users and use OCR technology to convert the collection of images to text. If you did this on your own, a good suite of software starts in the hundreds of dollars and goes up from there.

via DIY Book Scanners

image via Flickr

Zeutschel unveiled its latest scanner at CeBIT this week. The Zeta is a new design that is intended to be used by the unskilled. Ideally, this scanner would be placed in a reading room at a library where anyone could use it.

The actual scanner is in the hood over the book, which makes it easier for a user to position the book than if it were face down. There’s a screen to the right of the scanner, and you can use the screen to make sure that a book is positioned correctly before starting the scan.

The Zeta comes equipped with a USB port, and it can also be connected to a LAN network. The scanner menus has a user friendly design, and it has several software features designed to compensate for user error. It can correct for a book placed at a skewed angle, and it can also crop fingers from a scan. The Zeta will also compensate for the curve of a page of an open book.

It should be available in the latter half of 2011, and a price has not been set.

Zeutschel via golem.de

This past weekend, Make Magazine’s Maker Faire visited New York City. Among a life sized “Mouse Trap” board game, a performance of Mentos exploding Coke bottles and Rubix cube-solving robots, there were a couple of book related innovations.

The Book Liberator is a homemade book scanner that uses two cameras within a cube structure to scan a print book. The photos are saved as image files, which can then be formatted into an eBook format using software called Djuvubind and Scantailor.

Here is more from the Book Liberator blog: “Djuvubind takes all of those individual images, stitches them together, and compresses that into a very tiny book in the djvu format. I have 1400 page academic books that are now pleasantly readable 10 MB files thanks to this combination of Scantailor and Djvubind…. For each of those 1400 page books all I had to do was 1) rotate the first two pages, 2) hit “Go” for auto crop, 3) draw a box around the few pictures so that their full resolution would be preserved in the final output, 4) run djvubind.”

Another book related project at the Maker Faire was called “BYOB” aka “Bring Your Own Books,” which makes interactive art out of throwing print books. To play, you throw a print book at a blank projection of light on the wall. When the book hits the lighted panel, letters come falling from the projection. Check out this video to see how it works. Kids at the fair were lined up for the action.

It’s unlikely that you’re waiting around for the play-by-play on Google’s book scanning project, but it’s our job to cover all the digital book news, so here’s one bit of minutia: the University of Minnesota is sending its first shipment of books to Google for scanning this very month, according to the AP.

Here’s an excerpt: “Among the books going to Google are volumes from the university’s noted collections related to forestry, beekeeping, Scandinavian literature and Minnesota’s early history.” Beekeepers, finally there will be a Web-resource for you.

Google will provide the university with scans of all public domain books.

Google has made its first book canning deal with a national government’s ministry of culture, reports The Bookseller. Through the agreement, Google will scan, and pay for the scanning of, public domain books from libraries in Rome and Florence. The coolest part is that, among the million book Google has agreed to scan, are works by Galileo and Kepler. So, if you read Italian but don’t live in Italy, you’ll soon have some very interesting books to peek at.

Clear your calendar–you’ve got 65,000 free books to read. According to Pocket Lint, The British Library is about to make that many books of 19th Century fiction available as free eBooks.

According to The Telegraph, “Owners of the
Amazon Kindle e-book device will be able to view the books, including their original typeface and illustrations, of famous works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as thousands of more obscure authors.” It’s not clear from this article whether only UK Kindle owners will have access, but we’ll look into it. Pocket Lint says “It’s not clear yet where the books will be available from,” and presumably they mean in the US.

POD print copies of these editions will be available from Amazon for 15 pounds. That’s pretty cool. Plus, 40% of these titles are unavailable in other libraries.

What’s a well-established university-based poetry publisher to do when it’s got a huge backlist of very old poetry titles it has promised to keep in print, but which don’t have sufficient sales to justify reprinting? Go digital of course! That’s what Boise-based Ahsahta press has done with Forty-five titles from its Modern and Contemporary Poetry of the American West Series, which ran between 1975 and 2000.

Janet Holmes, the press’s director, explained how she decided to digitize these books: “We had huge inventories of books that had not sold a copy in years. These were books largely published in the 1970s and 1980s, and we had quantities of them because the previous director of the press had promised authors (though not, thankfully, in a contract!) that he would keep the books ‘in print for all eternity,’ and reprinted in press runs of 500. At about this time (this was two years ago), the library at Boise State began to digitize some of the titles in the Western Writers Series, a monograph series of scholarly articles, for ScholarWorks, an archive available online through the library. I inquired about the possibility of archiving the older Ahsahta Press series and was encouraged to do so. An Ahsahta intern scanned the books into searchable PDF files during last summer, and the folks in the archivist’s office at Alberston Library put them into ScholarWorks for us. ScholarWorks resides in our library, but its titles show up in internet searches and can be accessed by anyone.”

The archive includes early books by such well-known contemporary poets as David Baker and Linda Bierds. These titles aren’t exactly eBooks–they must be accessed through ScholarWorks, but this is a step in the direction this blogger bets lots of poetry and small presses will move in over the next few years, taking advantage of digital technology in order to publish to the scale of its audience.

Last week marked the beginning of Project Gutenberg’s 40th year. The first producer of free eBooks, the visionary Project Gutenberg was started in 1971 by Michael Hart (pictured) and slowly but steadily produced–often by hand-typing–eBook versions of public domain titles. In 2009, the project produced its 35,000th eBook. Here’s more from the Project Gutenberg blog:

“In 2009 we saw our 35,000th internally produced eBook go out, and our 25,000 in English, our 1,500th in French, 600th in German and 500th in Finnish. We also saw Dutch and Chinese pass 400 eBooks. (We still need to find ways to do more in Spanish and Portuguese.)

“These 35,000+ eBooks, which represent over 50 languages are all at www.gutenberg.org. There are also over 75,000 Donated eBooks representing over 100 languages are at www.gutenberg.cc. In total, counting the eBooks donated to us from other eLibraries, individuals and schools Gutenberg.cc now has well over 100,000 titles, though it is probably closer to an even 100,000, given various duplications, etc.”

This is very cool and the best kind of use of digital book scanning. The Library of Congress, in collaboration with The Internet Archive and using a $2 million grant from the Sloan Foundation, has scanned 60,000 delicate books from its vast collection and made them available for online reading–and download in various formats, including EPub and Kindle–for anyone who wants to check them out.

Here’s more from America.gov: “‘The Library chose books that people wanted, but that were too old and fragile to serve to readers. They won’t stand up to handling,’ said Michael Handy, who co-managed the project, which is called Digitizing American Imprints.”

The LOC also published a report on best practices for scanning fragile books and retired the scanned volumes to a safe storage facility. These books can now be accessed through the library’s online catalog. Check out the oldest book scanned, a record of two Presbyterian ministers’ trial from 1707.