Gizmodo has a piece on the BookLiberator, a cube of plexiglass that contains two opposite-facing video cameras to photograph facing pages of a book. You place it on a book, photograph, lift, turn page, place it, etc.
Conceptually, this appears similar to the $300 DIY Book Scanner I covered in December—they both use two cameras to snap two facing pages at a time. The BookLiberator looks a little more tedious, comparing the two: with the DIY scanner, you just tilt up a hinged half-cube to turn the page, but with the BookLiberator you have to lift the entire cube out of the book.
Still, it’s good to see more non-destructive, relatively fast scanning technologies coming out, whatever the differences. Sooner or later, scanning will be something literally anyone can do. (Video embedded below the jump.)
Why no place the cube upside down, so you can place the book face down on top?
A Chinese manufacturar should be able to make this with two webcam-cameras for about $20…
If you are really serious about scanning your books, and ending up with a high quality epub, or search enabled, print ready PDF I suggest you visit:
http://scanyourbooks.com/
Kirtas Technologies is the world leader in non-destructive robotic book scanning!