Right now there is a 500-year backlog of books to be scanned at the current technology of 100 pages per hour. But the bar just got raised as Kirtas Technologies recently unveiled its APT BookScan 1200, a machine that can now scan 1,200 pages in one hour and expedites conversion from books to bytes that much faster.
For only $150,000, you get the world's first fully automatic book digitizer with an integrated automatic book turning robot and a 16.6 megapixel camera with 600 dpi resolution for color or black and white images.
Google will eventually facilitate the digitization of all of the books in the world, so, one day, you'll be able to search them on their new book search engine, Google Book Search. But it was looking like that day was still a long way away until this technology came out.
Take a look for yourself at this video to see how this awesome machine will save time and get the job of scanning books even sooner.
Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have long vowed to make all of the world's information accessible to anyone with a Web browser. That vow came closer to being implemented when Google made an agreement with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web. Now, it's closer still.
Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library are some of the U.S. institutions that will be involved. The whole project will convert about 15 million books at a cost of $150 million, or about $10 per book.
Plus, the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a plan to create a publicly available digital archive of 1 million books on the Internet.
I don't know about you, but I am very excited by all of this. Think of it -- you could have every book in the world available for you to read any time you wanted to!
Amazing.