World’s fastest scanner digitizes a 200 page book in 60 seconds

Uh, not to knock the cool engineering that went in to this, but serious high-speed book scanning involves removal of the book spine and passing the pages through a sheet-fed scanner.

If you have a rare book or archival copy you don’t want to cut, then speed isn’t your primary issue – quality is.

I think the objective in developing this system was to achieve the trifecta of speed, accuracy, and protecting the integrity of the source book.

Just think what the world will look like in a few years if they get this system built into smartphones. Suddenly bookstores will have to ban them, because a minute or two with the smartphone and a book will copy the entire text of it to the device.

Stores in Japan already have problems with people with cameraphones snapping shots of magazine pages to read later.