When the Visigoths burned Library Of Alexandria you can bet that old Ptolemy I Soter would have loved to have had a Czur (pronounced “Cesar”) scanner in his palatial marble-clad staterooms. The
is basically a book scanner on steroids that allows you to scan a 300-page book – or priceless scroll of ancient knowledge – in about five minutes.
The Czur is a sort of camera/scanner hybrid that lets you put a book on a main scanning plate and then turn the pages. It takes individual pictures of each page, processes them, and even takes out errant hand photos. The early bird price is $189 which is pretty good for a book scanner like this. You can also put other objects under the high-resolution camera and an HDMI port lets you send the images right to a projector. A foot pedal lets you trigger the scanner remotely and the average person can scan about 80 pages a minute using the software.
The team has blown past their $20,000 goal and, although their marketing materials are a little rough, you get the general vision of the system, especially considering it can scan books while flattening the pages properly and getting a nice clean image and OCR output.
Is the Czur also a wholesale book piracy machine? Maybe! But it could be a great help if you’re working a longer bit of non-fiction or research and could be a godsend for a smaller library interested in moving into the digifuture. The team expects to ship in January.
