[the Internet Archive is working with folks who are digitizing books and then
printing them back out again e.g.
http://www.archive.org/bookmobile and http://www.archive.org/texts. As part
of this Mike Lesk wrote this report on a robotic page turner. -brewster ]


Visit to see Digital Line robot scanner.

On Nov. 4th I visited the Stanford library to see the robot page-turner.
It's quite an impressive machine if probably not economically justifiable
yet. It's the size of about four refrigerators and contains many complex
mechanical parts: two vacuum tables, one for each side of the book, which
raise and lower by stepping motors; sliding glass panels that come over the
book to hold it down for scanning; a traversing carriage with lights and a
linear CCD array; and, most important, a vacuum cylinder to lift a page to
be turned over. Lots of software (trade secret) and sensors figure out whether
one or two pages have been lifted. Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) would
be proud of this machine. It actually works quite well. It scanned one
well bound book with no problems; it required some resetting to turn the
pages correctly on a small tightly bound paperback which would not open
properly flat, and on a very badly assembled publication from Chad. It
will scan up to 900 pages per hour; the robot can actually turn close to
2000 pages per hour but the scanning camera is slower than the page turning.
It does seem that somebody has to watch the machine fairly carefully.

Given that a book has 300 pages, and that the machine takes perhaps five
minutes to set up for each book, I think that 2 books an hour is a realistic
expectation. At that rate it might scan, in two shifts, 8,000 books per
year; if the machine were depreciated over two years that would be a hardware
cost of about $15 per book, which is probably already more than the cost
of scanning in China or India with a more traditional scanning machine.
However, I'm very impressed to see this done at all.

It didn't damage the books, even the badly bound one, which I would
not have been surprised to see pages flying out of even if read
by a human.

The machine was demonstrated by Danick Bionda, danick.bionda@...
+41-32-835-57-75, fax +41-32-835-57-76 (Switzerland).