Got a truckload of old books you want to get onto your Kindle and no patience for the laborious scanning all those college kids are doing? Not a problem with the ION BooK Saver, a scanner that cuts out some of the work when digitizing volumes from your library.
Made by ION Audio, the contraption is billed as the “fastest and most convenient system” for bringing your paperbacks, textbooks and periodicals into the digital realm. Unfortunately, being the fastest and most convenient doesn’t mean everything’s done automatically — you’ll still have to sit there the whole time, turning each page right after each pass.
The ION Book Saver is a tabletop machine with a cradle where you can lay down the book. When turned on, a sheet of glass will come down to flatten out each spread, after which a pair of cameras will take pictures of the two pages separately. The glass rises back up once the shot is made, at which point, you’ll have to turn the page yourself to capture the next spread.
According to the product page, the whole process of the glass coming down and getting each spread photographed takes about a second, which is way faster than the seven seconds currently required by other solutions. The scanned pages are then saved to an SD card, which you can access as image files on a computer. It comes with a bundled PC software that you can use for converting the images into text, along with any additional formatting you’d like to perform.
No exact release date is available for the ION Book Saver, but it’s listed as “coming soon” on the ION Audio website. Price is a bit steep, though, at $190.