Atiz is selling BookDrive, a desktop book-scanner with automatic page turning. The price is $35,000. (Thanks to Gizmodo via LIS News.)
Comment. The price is high and I have no idea about the quality of the scans. But Atiz shows what's coming. Book scanning won't be limited to giants like Google, the OCA, the EU, or even university libraries. Publisher groups like the AAP were always wrong to complain that the Google book-scanning project threatened to give one company "control" of book literature. Google wouldn't control the print editions and Google wouldn't control other people's digital copies of the same books. However, it was true that the barrier to making separate digital copies was insurmountable for most people and most organizations. Imagine what will be possible as the barrier comes down.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/21/2006 09:08:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
