The technology for sharing the written word has improved dramatically over the centuries. Back in ancient Egypt, if you wanted to jot down your thoughts, you needed some serious hardware:

Those were the times of the Rosetta Stone. Now, in a recent Newsweek article Steven Levy discusses the idea of converting books to digital form, that is ripping books. The article focuses on the BookSnap device made by Atiz. And while Levy isn’t too impressed with the device (he thinks it’s expensive, bulky and could be more user-friendly), he warns that it’s a sign of things to come. The time when you’ll be able to fill up your “book iPod” with books from your library is fast approaching, he warns. I agree, and I’m pretty excited about it. It would be really nice to be able to search books, annotate them, copy quotes, etc. Not to mention read your books on an electronic reader.

Improvements to BookSnap are in the works. In fact, while BookSnap requires manual handling of pages, there are companies that make page turners, e.g. Pageflip. Combining such technology with scanning may provide low cost book rippers. Of course there are more serious devices out there too, like this one, but most of us couldn’t fit it into our basements (or budgets).

While we’re waiting for the cheap book ripping solution, we can download free e-books from the Gutenberg Project (and since the copyright on these books has expired in the US, we can freely share them too). The Gutenberg Project books come in plain text format, which can be read by e.g. the Amazon Kindle.

Andrew Kun

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