The Information Professional

"Recently a Google engineer unveiled a do-it-yourself (DIY) robotic book scanner. As reported by The Verge, Dany Qumsiyeh and a team of colleagues constructed it out of sheet metal, scanner parts, and an ordinary vacuum cleaner to build a page-turning scanner that only requires human intervention to put a book on the device. Scans are automatically sent to a connected laptop. “After a quick 40-second setup,” states the article, “it can digitize a 1000-page book in a little over 90 minutes.”

But perhaps even more amazing is that they have open sourced the plans and patents, thereby providing anyone the ability to do the same thing. Clearly, putting this together takes skills that many of us don’t have, but what it likely means is that some enterprising business will start making the robotic book scanner to capture a market heretofore not well served by scanners that cost tens of thousands of dollars."

Open source plans and patents: http://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/