Hi! I work for on the Google Books team. Today I am incredibly proud of some of my teammates, because after very quietly working on this project for a long time, their research and labor has finally been released as an open-source project with open patents!
This is one of the most innovative scanner designs I’ve ever seen, and now anybody can build one given the right materials and skills. And – get this – the total cost is only around $1500.
If it’s not clear what is going on here, what they’ve invented is a new type of paper scanner. It can scan both sides of every page in an entire thousand-page-long book without a human touching the device at all once it starts, and it will never tear a page. How amazing is that?
The source code and full design for this device and its supporting systems can be found here: https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/
Watch the tech talk video! You too can build a book-scanning cheese grater out of bits of sheet metal, a stepper motor, a vacuum cleaner(!), and parts from flatbed scanners that you can buy at Fry’s.
I have never been so proud of my coworkers. Books team, Dany, Jeff, everyone else involved: You folks are brilliant!
A Pun Involving Travel 