In the July 07, 2009 newsletter, I posted an article entitled, Kirtas Offers Digitized Books. I described the thousands of e-books now available online from Kirtas Technologies. I also briefly mentioned the company's book scanner, which can scan up to 2400 pages per hour.
Todd Whiting, Manager or Marketing Operations at Kirtas Technologies has now posted a comment at the end of that earlier article stating that my figures are out of date. Todd writes:
"Three new partners are coming on board that will push us over 1,000,000 books this summer, and over 2,000,000 by year's end.
"In addition, we have just announced 3 new scanners at ALA in Chicago. KABIS III will scan at a rate of 3,000 pages per hour."
You can read the original article at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/07/kirtas-offers-digitized-books.html.
Does anyone know of an option for the average person to use a book scanner like this? I have a small collection of old books I would like to get scanned and didn't know if there was a list of local libraries/places that you could take them too that doesn't have a high cost of scanning or allows you to do it yourself.
Posted by: Ryan | July 15, 2009 at 07:36 AM
I was looking through the genealogy books at kirtasbooks.com and noted that all of the ones that I've referenced before were already available for free at books.google.com. This will be a great resource if we can get genealogy material not available at either google or archive.org
Posted by: Paul Piatkowski | July 15, 2009 at 08:26 AM
Just remember that someone had to pay a "high cost" to purchase such a scanner. Asking a fee to scan is not out of the question. Also if such was available, I as a hypothetical owner of such a scanner, would be extremely reluctant to let just anyone "do it yourself." Being on our local library board, libraries are going to be hard pressed NOT to charge fees for such services just to keep their doors open. (Ask Michigan!)
Posted by: Gene | July 15, 2009 at 04:38 PM