BooksnapWelcome to the next disruptive technology for the book trade.
The force of commerce and the march of technology are soon to meet again at the booksellers door. The door might not be open for long but if entered correctly it might become a new source of revenue for the bookseller.
Once Google’s romance with the libraries is over do you think Google will stop looking for other sources of information to feed the machine?
I would guess within 5 years or so Google will have cycled through the library trade and determined who they will be playing with and they will know what information they’ve acquired.
Outside of libraries booksellers are one of the few repositories for untapped information. There is an enormous amount of unique content stored within the confines of the bookselling trade. From books long out of print to ephemeral items that present core samples of our material culture, there is a treasure trove of content awaiting the light of digitization.
More importantly the active bookseller is acquiring material at an equal or in many cases a faster pace then libraries or institutions and they often handle the material before it lands in these special collections.
The race would seem to be between Google and the first company to bring the cost of quality digitizing technology down so that the independent bookseller can afford it.
Early this year we had the release of the Espresso Book Machine, a $50,000 vending machine that will print and bind you a book in 7 minutes. Impressive but cost prohibitive for most booksellers. Earlier this month the first offering of affordable technology arrived. BookSnap, “the first digital book ripper designed for individual consumers,” hit the market. At a price of$1595 (without cameras) it is within reach though as a first generation technology it has some expected limitations.
“We designed the BookSnap for people who have always wanted to digitize their personal libraries but haven’t had a viable way to do it – until now,” said Nick Warnock, president, Atiz Innovation.
The limitations:
-Their horrendous tagline “It’s not a scanner. It’s a book ripper,” clearly they are not coming at this from the book side of things.
-Translates the captured text into PDF format only.
-Booksnap has the ability to capture 500 pages an hour. This sounds impressive until you realize that the page turning process is not automated. Do you have they ability to turn 500 pages an hour?
Here is how it works.
I hope the book trade doesn’t wait for the Google monster to descend before the digitization issue is addressed. We should be exploring the possibilities of working with the likes of the Open Content Alliance and the Prelinger Archive to devise strategies to digitally capture the content that moves through the trade.
Of course, the content has to first be digitized for the public good; for the most important part of the process is to preserve our culture’s output and provide free access to it. Then, and only then should we monetize the content. I believe both can happen.
Previous Book Patrol post Books: Espresso Style or Another Nail in the Coffin of the New Bookstore