Atiz BookSnap is a Book Ripper, not a Scanner
I’ve often wondered why the age of the ebook is yet to be upon us. I suppose it has something to do with people wanting to hold real books and feel the pages turning.
Still, Atiz is prepared for this coming age with the BookSnap. Most people would call it a book scanner, but the company calls it a book ripper. I don’t like the connotation of that, but it is able to turn a book into a PDF at 500 pages per hour.
It uses two digital cameras to accomplish this to account for this speed. It looks like you can go through a pile of books in a fraction of the time it would take for the traditional handscanner. Not only that, the BookSnap won’t curl the pages as you press them down.
I do have a few questions: First, how does it turn the pages. I mean, there are days that I have to lick my fingers, so is this device more precise? How does it insure it doesn’t skip a page?
I noticed in the picture that there are no paperbacks in the pile. Unfortunately, a lot of my books are paperbacks, so I’m not certain if this would work.
If you want it, you can get it at the Atiz site for $1,595.
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Gallery of Gizmos » Coolest Gadgets Says: November 16, 2007 at 1:19 am
[...] Atiz BookSnap is a Book Ripper, not a Scanner [...]
Sarasin Says: November 15, 2007 at 3:25 am
Hello from Atiz.
Paperbacks work just fine on BookSnap so you can use it to scan things like cartoons, magazines, or pocketbooks.
The page turning is still a manual process so users still need to flip the pages. The rest is automated, which includes:
- The capturing process. No need to press a button. The cameras will automatically capture the pages themselves as the pages get turned. It saves users thousand times of clicks.
- There is no image processing work left to be done as it is in the case of traditional scanners.
– Cropping, page rotation, deskewing, optimizing, are done on the fly right after shooting so you get a good PDF book a minute after you’ve finished the last page.
Contrary to what most people might think, the most time-consuming process for average users (Google not included) is not necessarily the page flipping step, but the image processing post scanning manually done on a page by page basis to ensure that the final ebooks look exactly like the originals.
BookSnap integrates the software workflow into the overall workflow so once u’ve done turning the pages, it’s done.