Illegal coping of books made easier now, score another one for college students.

"Scientists Hope to End Book-Breaking Work"
NewsFactor Network (12/17/04); Martin, Mike

"One of the frustrations of copying material in books is the risk of damaging their spines by flattening the books against the copier's scanning surface so as to avoid warped and poorly illuminated text that may inhibit clear reading. To counter this problem, Xerox researchers Beilei Xu and Robert Loce have inexpensively refined the software of common scanners by embedding a mathematical formula that compensates for disparities in distance from the platen along a bound book page. This removes the distortion of words running along the page's center as well as eliminates darker copy sections where the page is bound to the book. Xu says the updated copier software calculates the distance of the book from the scanning surface for every page pixel by employing the same light the scanners beam and analyze. Xu and Loce detailed their new scanning technology at last month's 5th International Conference on Imaging Science and Hard Copy. City College of New York computer science professor George Wolberg notes that Google intends to make major library collections available over the Internet, an effort that will involve the digitization of scores of books. 'Any book-scanning technology must address digital correction of warped pages of text,' he says".

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Scientists-Hope-To-End-Book-Breaking-Work&story_id=29147