In the latest episode of edugogo I talked to Georg Winkler, the creator of a software called Booksorber. Being a physics student Georg had to carry a lot of heavy textbooks. This was incredibly inconvenient as he also traveled a lot during his studies. Hence, he needed an easy yet affordable way to digitize his textbooks.
Now, we have all been at the point where we tried to scan in pages of a book with a flatbed scanner. It takes a lot of time and the results are usually pretty awful looking. And getting a professional book scanner makes no sense as well as they cost a ton of money. So Georg came up with a solution that takes advantage of tech most of us already have at hand or which is at least easy to get.
With Booksorber all you need is a digital camera, a tripod, a remote trigger, a black background and a good light source. Then you can scan / photograph an entire book in a very short time. Georg and his alpha testers found that 80 pages per minute are no problem at all, and with some practice you can easily get to 100 pages per minute. Hence you can scan a 500 page textbook in about 5 to 10 minutes easily. Afterwards all you need to do is to import the pictures to the Booksorber software. The smart algorithm will then automatically detect pages, separate them, fix distortion, bad lighting and more.
In the end, you receive a high quality pdf which also will work with OCR for search in the book, bookmarking etc.
If you ever have had to deal with a problem like this I think you know what to do. Go over to Indiegogo and get your copy of Booksorber at a discounted price today. All contributions on Indiegogo will go directly into the finishing touches of Booksorber. The first version will run on Windows but OSX and Linux will follow shortly. For more information you can also visit booksorber.com
