Rip This Book? Not Yet.(The Technologist)(atiz booksnap)

Byline: Steven Levy

Could the publishing industry get napsterized? That was my first thought when I saw the marketing materials for the Atiz BookSnap, the first consumer device that enables you to "release the content" of your books by transforming the printed words on the page into digital files that can be read on computers and handheld e-readers. "It's not a scanner," proclaims a banner on the Atiz Web site.

"It's a book ripper." Though ripping (transferring content from an external medium to your computer) does not imply an act of piracy, I couldn't help but wonder whether this was a sign of impending apocalypse on Publishers' Row, a scenario that could end up with people file-sharing John Grisham's latest the way they do now with the newest Vampire Weekend tunes.

Then I tested a BookSnap for myself. Short verdict: not a revolution. The device--an ominous meter-high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade--looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 20 kilograms. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold down the pages during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (about $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly. Supposedly, once you get started you can digitize 500 pages per hour, much faster and at higher quality than with flatbed scanners. I never got that far, but I imagine such a feat would require considerable caffeination.

Still, the very existence of a consumer book scanner is one of those early warnings of turbulence to come. In the mind of its inventor, Sarasin (Art) Booppanon, scanners will one day become commonplace appliances. Four years ago, Booppanon, 28, who is from ...