After many months of design and iterative prototyping and at the cost of a small amount of spilled blood, we are happy to announce that we have a final design for the Book Liberator. Take a look: This overall design is not much different from our early builds, but it includes many small [...]
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Book Liberator in Forbes
Ian and I demoed our design-complete prototype for Forbes, and they did a good writeup on the device. This will help get the word out. Tell your friends, warn your enemies: Book Liberator is coming, and it will scan your books!
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Book Liberator at HOPE
Book Liberator cadged some table space at HOPE from our sponsor, Question Copyright. We met lots and lots of awesome hackers, and discovered they all love the Book Liberator. We started a lot of good and useful conversations this weekend about everything from manufacturing to remote shutter trigger to lighting options. We’ll be in touch [...]
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Book Liberator in the News
The Book Liberator got a writeup in Good magazine! I sent in hundreds of rambling words about the project, and Theo distilled them into a few pithy quotes. Thanks, Theo, for making me seem clever!
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Prototypes ahoy!
Last week, Ian and Winnie got all heroic with some tools, wood and plexi. The result is a couple sweet prototypes, which we’ll be sending to the Decapod folks so they can hack software to process BookLib images. In other news, I put a prototype design of the camera mount on thingiverse. Ian’s original washer-and-bolt [...]
Pushing Paper
Great piece up today by Paul Grahm called Post-Medium Publishing
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A Bit about Book Ripping
Digitizing your own books The Book Ripper community, bkrpr.org, came together to take the difficulty out of digitizing books. Unlike music, movies, or even loose paper, books have proved surprisingly difficult to break out of their analog format. Very complicated robotic scanners, costing tens of thousands of dollars, have been built to address this problem, [...]
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Building in Parallel
We’ve talked about other efforts to digitize books before but now things are getting a lot closer to home. Yesterday, a group of three grad students posted an instructable on how to build a book scanning device using a similar V-shaped cradle, the same camera model, and for about the same price as our design. [...]
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6 Ways to Save Publishing
Michael Tamblyn, the CEO of BookNet Canada, presents 6 ways technology can improve the world of paper book publishing. For me, the most interesting tidbit in that video is that 99.5% of Canadian book sales are paper books (I suppose this is as opposed to digital or audio books). And if you’re interested in how [...]
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Grouping
We’ve got a google group! Now that a number of people are in the process of building their own book rippers we need a place where we can pull together the multiple discussions we’ve been having over email and in other forums. The google group should do that very nicely. Come on by. For those [...]
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