Startup Idea #10: Book to Text
Posted by Terry on 11/23/2008 at around 11:47 PMHello all! I’ve been really busy with Jaxified trying to get things in order for our next version, and it’s coming along really well, but I apologize for the lack of updates. Let me make it up to you with this doozy (sp?) of a good idea (so I think):
With the progression of OCR and scanning technology, it should be really easy to take a book, unbind it and scan it into a document (PDF likely). But it’s still extremely complicated and moreover time consuming (especially using one of those handheld OCR readers for big books).
So the idea is simply that: Create a website that gives people a shipping address. Have them create an “order” on the website and, on receipt of payment, give them a shipping label to print out complete with a barcode for tracking. When you receive the book, you get the ISBN (this is important for later), unbind it, scan it in using some OCR technology and convert it into a PDF.
Once this process is complete, you rebind the book and send it back. You also e-mail the user a link to where they can download the PDF. For assurance, you could also give them a preview of the scanned pages (select a few at random) for the user to review and accept before making the final payment. Once you’ve got the book scanned in, every subsequent user who sends the same book can just get a copy of the same PDF to save time and money (but because the user already has the book, you’re not selling an electronic copy of it, you’re selling a scanning service).
I’m sure the legal issues surrounding this are gray, but for students and lots of others this would be a huge hit, especially with some good OCR technology that you could actually search through for text, etc.
If anyone has any thoughts, let me know; I’d be up to using this myself if someone did it.
As always, thanks for reading.
No need to “unbind” book, just send it to Kirtas Technologies, their automatic book scanners are easier on a book than the human hand.
The will scan it, OCR it and PDF it if that’s what your after, they can deliver the book in a number of different format, and they can OCR more than 190 languages.
http://www.kirtas.com
Right, I’m thinking something similar to what Kirtas is doing but a more mass consumer play, with an easy price calculator on the website with an ordering system, etc.
You run into the issue of copyright protection on a lot of the stuff that the general public is interested in digitizing. We have worked out a number of solutions along that front, and the web form is a good idea in theory, the customer isn’t always clear on what they actually want or need. You’d be surprised at the amount of human contact needed on a lot of projects, because there is no real standard as to digitization, everyone has their own ideas around the concept whether it be for archival, monetary or research. The lines are still a bit fuzzy.