Plustek is showing this $700 Book Reader V100 at CES 2009. It scans books directly into MP3 audio files using optical code recognition (OCR) and a tiny little man with a mellifluous baritone voice trapped inside. Or some kind of text-to-speech program. I’m not sure which.
Given the choice between this and buying something that’s available on Audible, I can’t imagine this is worth doing if you value your time. You’ve got to manually scan each page. I’d love to see a re-make that uses some LEGO Mindstorms as a page turner, coupled with a computer, scanner, OCR, and text-to-speech.
6 thoughts on “alt.CES: Scan books into audio files”
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If it had a sheet feeder, you could saw the spine of the book off, and then scan it…
http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html
Woyzeck, that’s excellent.