Robotic Book Scanner

Abstract

Digitizing books has been an issue tackled by companies to allow people to read off Kindles and iPads rather than the traditional paperback. Companies like Google have spent more than $1000 on machines to convert books into electronic copies readable on devices. Yet, not much effort has been made into the invention of an automatic book scanner for consumers. This project seeks to determine a cost-effective approach to robotic book scanning to create PDFs from physical books. This project serves as a proof of concept for a reasonably priced automatic book scanner accessible to consumers. Potentially, the device may be used in libraries similarly to copy machines where the user pays to have their book converted to electronic form, however, security measures would need to be made over access to the PDFs. If developed cost-efficiently enough, consumers may benefit as far as to have the device in their homes to convert their entire book collections to personal PDFs