[Tris]

 “This handheld device can take a photograph of any printed material and read it aloud. In many ways we like to think of this tech as a ramp for a book. We have a ramp for buildings so people can get into buildings, and this is a ramp for books so people can easily get into books.”

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/353371/intel-boss-i-ll-wash-bransons-planes-if-he-doesnt-like-our-reader

[slackline]

Nice idea, don't think I've got the patience to turn the pages of a whole book so it can be scanned in and have it read back to me (presumably you'd want to do this if you were going away rather than taking a book and the device with you).

Niche market really though.

Hopefully it won't be adopted by schools, so that kids actually still learn how to read for themselves.

EDIT : Oh and its a tad pricey at present with a retail price of £999 !!!

[Tris]

Nice idea, don't think I've got the patience to turn the pages of a whole book so it can be scanned in and have it read back to me

“I put it on the [optional portable capture] station and I scanned it, 262 pages. That book I could then make an MP3 of. I attached it to my Mac and then I put it on my iPhone.”

It is just a fancy OCR to audio solution really - most books are available as Ebooks now though, so you are right - it would only be useful for say dyslexic people who couldn't read newspapers.

[tomtom]

OCR is pretty easy nowadays.. a couple of years ago I scanned in two dictionaries and OCR'd them to help someone with a research project looking for textural (?) changes between the two. I had two new dictionaries - took them to a binder had the spine shaved off in their big guillotine - then dropped them in the photocopier at work. This scanned them and emailed me the PDF's which I then OCR'd. Accuracy was pretty good and I recon the whole thing (apart from the trip to the binders) took less than an afternoon...

Could someone write an app that reads in the google books pages and turns them into MP3's?? that would be neat!