$699 Plustek Scanner Turns Books into Audio Files
Plustek is introducing a not-so-mobile scanner that actually does have a mobile aspect. The BookReader V100 actually does read books for you, but it won’t write a book report for you. Sorry, kids! This $699 scanner takes print content and applies OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, to understand the written word. It then converts the scanned materials into .MP3 audio files, so you can essentially turn any book into an audio book for your digital audio player.
I have a large personal print library and although I hate to repurchase content, I have to wonder if an Audible account is a better value for most folks. While the V100 is pretty impressive in terms of what it does, $699 is a tough nut to crack for consumers. Unless they add that book report function I mentioned before. Then this thing would sell faster than all the Cliff’s Notes in the world.
an emotionless, computer-generated voice gets old quick.. that is the main reason i will be keeping my audible account…
I have the opticbook from plustek. It is great to convert book to to adobe pdf format. It does take time to scan, but once you have it in pdf format it is portable. I am going to purchase bound books and scan them, because of the drm issues. I am then going to put them on a windows home server for true portablity. DRM is the problem with books, just like audio and movies. Books are portable, dvd, & cd’s are portable. The problem is with digital versions not haveing a common format. Audio has mp3, movies has h.264, but books need a standard like pdf.
Why not just use free ocr software with a cheap scanner in the first place? free text-to-seepch programs exist