If you’re a really fast reader, you can finish off a book in a day, maybe tackle a short one in as little as an hour or two. Good for you, but that’s nothing compared to the BFS-Auto book-scanning robot. It can handle 250 pages in a minute. That’s fast even for a machine.
The robot is designed to take the annoying parts out of book-digitisation. Instead of having to scan or photograph yourself, with the BSF-Auto you just have to be ready to load more books into the chamber, as if you’re manning some kind of crazy literature-devouring cannon. And it’s taking not one but two pictures of each page, one while the page is in motion to try and get a shot of it being flat. And on top of that, there’s software behind the scenes to help flatten the images out.
These robots are still in development, aimed for rollout sometime during 2013, and it’s not hard to imagine how they could make widespread book digitisation a reality and deal with entire libraries in a matter of days. I just wish I could have read that fast in university instead of constantly trying to talk about books I never opened. Although I still probably would have been too lazy. [Ishikawa Oku Laboratory via Reddit]