For years, I’ve said that if there was a way to rip a book the way you can rip a CD onto a computer, ebooks would become exponentially more popular. This fellow hasn’t come up with a commercial application, but he does have a way to transform his books into ebooks in just a few seconds.
I bet that somewhere, someone out there is working on an easy-to-use commercial version of this. If they can make an affordable device, they will make a shit-ton more money than some of these businesses that have slapped together ebook readers in the past few years.

omg…that dude looks so so bored…..why are engineers, scientists and lovers of all that is awesome always so uenthused with their work…its kinda tragic really….
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Oh, Chinese spammer, when will you learn you must register to post URLs? Or, uh, almost-URLs.
Take a hacksaw, cut off the spine, and put them through a sheet fed scanner with OCR.
@4, there’s no way in hell a hacksawed book would go through a sheet feeder. It would leave an impossible chewed, torn, shredded, fluffed, curled, fuzzed edge. You cut paper with knives, not saws, especially hand saws.
Nice profile pic, Bailo.
@5:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanni…
“Traditional methods have included cutting off the book’s spine and scanning the pages in a scanner with automatic page-feeding capability, with rebinding of the loose pages occurring afterwards.”
And you do know that for the last 10 years or more any book put out by a large scale printer-that’s anyone who isn’t hand-setting the type-has already been created as an electronic file? It’s how the plates for the presses are created these days.
Most ebook sales are for new titles, so getting everyone’s back list online isn’t that *ahem* pressing an issue.
Not that I’m sorry to see anyone working to make that happen more rapidly and easily.
As @6 says, old books can be scanned very fast and very accurately by a feed scanner with OCR. The Fujitsu I’m familiar with and have used often came out four years ago, cost $5000, and can scan and OCR and save a 250-page text in about 10 or 12 minutes. I’m sure newer models (attached to newer PCs) are much faster.
Even easier would be exporting the typeset book text to a PDF. Assuming you had access to the typeset book text.
@6, cut WITH KNIVES. Not hacksaws.
um… i dont want to burst any bubbles, but i work at a kinkos. we have a machine that chops the spines off of books, multiple at a time if necessary. scanning 250 pages, double sided would take a lot less than 10-12 minutes. seriously. at the kinkos. slimy businessmen use it every day of their slimy lives. plus, real books are pretty great. it’s not broken, why is anyone trying to fix it? ebooks are bourgie.
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