$199 Czur scanner gets thumbs-up from Internet Archives’ Brewster Kahle

Update, Nov. 13: Here.

The now-$199 high-speed Czur scanner from China has drawn a thumbs-up from Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, at least based on what the promo says.

“Very cheap!” he tells me an an e-mail. “We would love to see more people scanning, and this might help.”

Brewster noted that “the pitch video said the images go to their cloud server” and he hopes that “one can move them to something like the Internet Archive.”

“Our scanning tends to be higher end, but it costs more…not sure how much time we will have to evaluate their unit.”

For information on the archives’ own Table Table Scribe hardware, you can go here.

In the place of the Czur’s creators, I would send Brewster an eval unit for free, just in case he did have time to play around with the scanner. Potentially Czur could be that much of a game-changer as I see it. The scanner’s creators say it can scan a 300 page book in five minutes, with corrections for things such as as less-than-perfectly-flat pages.

Delivery is set for January. I have a Czur on order and will see for myself if the claims hold up.

Details: The Czur’s price of $199 and shipping is the current one on Indiegogo. Retail will be $400 although presumably there will be discounts for, say, mass purchases by institutions. As it stands, ten packs are available for $1,790 via Indiegogo.

Related: Slashdot discussion based on TeleRead’s earlier Czur post.