[LINK] eBooks

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Stil forwards

> .. the eBook working group .. "[N]one of the members of the panel
> appear to be doing much in the eBook sphere at all." ..


I'd bet just about everyone in that panel are feeling rather stabby.

Apparently, soon(ish), everyone with a mobile phone can make an eBook .. 

--
Speedy scanner re-writes book on publishing technology

Fri Apr 16, 2010 3:13am EDT www.reuters.com

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Simply flipping through a book may not seem like 
the best to way to scan it, but a Japanese research group at Tokyo 
University has created new software that allows hundreds of pages to be 
scanned within minutes.

Scanning paper is normally a tedious process with each page having to be 
inserted into a flat-bed scanner, but the team led by professor Masatoshi 
Ishikawa use a high speed camera that takes 500 pictures a second to scan 
pages as they are flipped.

Normal scanners can only scan the information that is actually before 
them on the page. The new scanner being developed is able to deal with 
the fact that pages that are being flipped are normally deformed in some 
fashion.

"It takes a shot of the shape, then it calculates the shape and uses 
those calculations to film the scanning," Ishikawa said, explaining the 
system used to reconstruct the original page.

"As it can film while understanding the underlying shape, it's very easy 
to then take the pages that are being scanned and save them as a normal 
flat copy."

The current system is able to scan an average 200-250 page book in a 
little over 60 seconds using basic computer hardware that is available 
off-the-shelf.

While it now requires extra time to process the scanned images, the 
researchers hope to eventually make the technology both faster and much 
smaller.

"In the more the distant future, once it becomes possible to put all of 
this processing on one chip and then put that in a iPad or iPod, one 
could scan just using that chip. At that point, it becomes possible to 
scan something quickly to save for later reading," Ishikawa told Reuters.

Being able to scan books with an iPhone may be further off, but Ishikawa 
says that a commercial version of the large-scale computer based scanning 
system could be available in two to three years.

While the technology has the potential to take paper books into the 
digital age, it remains to be how publishers will react to people 
scanning their books while just flipping through them.

(Reporting by Chris Meyers, editing by Miral Fahmy)

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Cheers,
Stephen