Gear

500 Pages–Per-Hour Book Scanner From Atiz Released

If you’ve ever wanted to scan the content of every single one of your books, for insurance in case of a flood or something else as equally compulsive, the new Booksnap book scanner from Atiz might be a great find for the holidays. This gadget is being marketed as the first consumer item available with […]

Book_scanner_2

If you've ever wanted to scan the content of every single one of your books, for insurance in case of a flood or something else as equally compulsive, the new Booksnap book scanner from Atiz might be a great find for the holidays.

This gadget is being marketed as the first consumer item available with the fastest scanning performance, at 500 pages per hour. It could be a potentially great gadget, albeit for a niche market, if it wasn't for this tiny bit of information: It doesn't include the actual scanning/ripping/picture taking device, meaning you have to have a couple of Canon cameras in order to make it work. However, for those that have the $1,595 to snap this baby up, another two thousand bucks for top cameras won't be a drag.

Currently, the Booksnap is compatible with the Canon Powershot G7, Canon Powershot A640, Canon Powershot A620, Canon Powershot S80, and the Canon Powershot S3 IS. The level of detail of a scanned page can be seen above, and here are more details from the release:

Hardware

Featuring a V-shaped book cradle, BookSnap allows for face-up scanning and keeps handling to a minimum, thereby reducing wear and tear on books. The cradle utilizes a unique auto-centering feature, which eliminates “margin crawl”

Software

A complete software package is included with BookSnap and completely automates the ripping process, making it as simple as the push of a button. In addition, the BookSnap Editor allows for post-ripping processing, including cropping, page resizing, brightness adjustment and DPI settings. In addition to PDF, BookSnap can output files to JPEG and TIFF formats.

We'll probably wait until this comes down in price, or when the quality of the scanning gets up to the level of the digital version of Da Vinci’s Codex at the British Library. It might be a long wait.