Electronic Book Saver

Rsadeika

There is a product called "Book Saver" made by iON, that will be up for sale in the near future. Basically it's a device that takes pictures of the pages in a book, and converts it to a digital format. Since I ordered a C3 board, I was trying to think of a project for it. Now, I am thinking of doing something like a "Book Saver", but, I would be using the C3 board. This is open to suggestions, and thoughts on the project.

A couple of months ago I tried something similar, using a scanner. I have a Cannon MP980 printer, which is able to scan, and save a PDF format file to a thumb drive. After scanning, and saving about five pages, I then used openoffice to open up the file. I was able to view the scanned pages, but, I was unable to edit the text that was scanned. That is where that test run ended.

I figure this project has three parts: 1.The mechanical, the actual frame the would hold the electronics, and optical device. 2.The electronics, C3 card, camera, and associated wiring. 3.The PC software, a program that would create the "book" file for storage, and convert it to a format that would be functional on my Nook, or Kindle.

For a prototype, I think, an adjustable L bracket to hold the camera, a tactile button, plus the wiring to attach it to the C3 board. The way it would work is, place the page under the camera, adjust the height for focus, and full page capture. Then press the button to have the C3 capture the data, convert to a file format, and copy it to the SD card.

So, now I need some suggestions as to what kind of cheap camera I could use, maybe something like a CMUcam? As for the Spin/pasm program, would it be able to create a file that could be used by some PC program to be converted to the final product, usable by an eReader?

The reason I started this thread here, and not the Propeller forum, is because, by mentioning C3, Spin/pasm, does not necessarily qualify it to be in the Propeller forum. Even though the discussion will be around the C3, Spin/pasm, and the Propeller, there is a lot more to this project.

Thanks
Ray

kwinn

This is a fairly ambitious project. First you need to scan a page with enough detail for the conversions, then convert the printed portions to text using OCR (optical character recognition). Minimum resolution for that would be around 300DPI, and 600 DPI is preferable. An 8.5x11 page would require an image of 2550x3300 resolution. An added complication would be saving the formatting information (font, size, bold/italics etc. In addition you would need to deal with any illustrations. No doubt the propeller could handle the scanning portion of the task but it would not have the memory to store the image internally.