Those who think android is a noun have obviously never androided a dress or book in a retail store. The Google application enables cell phone users to point their device at the bar code on a piece of store merchandise and gather vital information about the product (including where to buy it cheaper down the street or online). You can read about it in Please Don’t Android the Merchandise.

But, instead of going shopping, suppose you want to check out merchandise you read about in a magazine or newspaper? Stephanie Clifford, writing in the New York Times, has surveyed a variety of cell phone and other devices dedicated to scanning bar codes or URLs printed on paper. In theory you should be able to achieve as much in your armchair as you can by walking into a store and waving your device at a rack of dresses or a wall loaded with television sets.

Clifford writes: “With the sudden ubiquity of smartphones, which have apps that can read bar codes, and cameraphones, which can easily snap pictures of icons, magazines like Esquire and InStyle are adding interactive graphics to their articles, while Entertainment Weekly and Star are including them in ads.”

It sounds simple, fun, efficient and cool. Unfortunately, many of the products have been anything but. Something called :CueCat required installation of software. Then, in order to research a product you had to tether :CueCat to your computer and “wave it over the printed bar codes.” In addition to being clunky, people just didn’t know how to pronounce “:CueCat”. Was the prefixed colon a variant on Xhosa click language? In any event this gadget seems to have bit the dust.

Another one called SpyderLynk “surrounds client logos with a coded ring, and asks consumers to snap photos of the images, then text or e-mail them to a certain address.” says Clifford. We’re not sure the SpyderLynk comes with a decoder ring or you have to send in fifty Cheerios boxtops, but we’ll probably give it a pass.

Esquire readers will have an opportunity to try a different approach in the March issue, where they will find an article about “the 30 items a man would need to get through life,” according to Esquire‘s editor in chief. “Printed near each item will be a small code that looks like a group of black and white squares,” writes Clifford. “Readers scan the code into an Internet-enabled phone, and the code takes them to a mobile menu that provides Esquire’s styling advice for the item and information on where to buy it.” We’ll have to wait until March to learn if one of the 30 items a man needs to get through life is a woman, but if anyone learns the code for one please let us know at once.

For more details read Stephanie Clifford’s From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

SciTeDaily.com tells us that a team of University of Tokyo researchers claims to have simulated the process that Google recently patented to produce error-free images during high-speed scans of books.

The process corrects distortions created by the bending of pages near the binding, and does it while those pages are being rapidly turned. “The computer knows what the pattern looks like when it is flat,” SciTeDaily explains, “so when the computer sees the amount of distortion the pattern undergoes upon falling on the page, it can deduce the curvature.”

You can read about it here, and for the technical-minded there are cool illustrations and a video. You might also like to see a truly high-speed scanner: check out this one, also developed by Tokyo scientists, that flips pages faster than a card deck shuffled by a Vegas croupier.

For a thrilling climax to your tour of scanners you can see the world’s sexiest one in the video below but be warned that it is X-rated and you may need to take a cold shower after watching it in action.

Generally speaking there are two fundamental scanning processes. One simply photographs pages to produce a read-only PDF file. The other produces a computer-readable file – an RTF – that is the basis for conversion of printed books into digital files for Kindles, Nooks, Sony eReaders, and other devices.

The latter is a far more complex, demanding and expensive process. Ideally the scanner should produce a perfect text file but that is seldom the case. Not only are there distortions like those described above but frequently, if the pages are yellow or wrinkled or dusty the camera does not pick the words up cleanly. For example, “nn” can come out looking like “m”, or “l” might show up as “1″. Though scanning technology has come a long way, you need to understand that even 99.9% perfection in the “OCR” (Optical Character Recognition) still means one typo in every three or four pages. Therefore proofreaders are almost always required. Once the RTF is completely error-free, it is ready to be formatted for your e-book.

Richard Curtis

How’s your speed-reading? Ready to go up against a robot? Here’s your chance.

A Japanese laboratory has developed a scanner that can turn pages and scan their contents – text and images – at 1000 frames-per-second with a minimum of distortion.
“The system could be used to speed up the digitization process of low-cost e-books and other library data,” reports plasticpals, a website devoted to all things robotic.

“The camera uses lights connected to a synchronized control circuit and a laser range projector to estimate the three-dimensional page geometry. This allows it to correct any distortion from the page being turned while at the same time flashing it with uniform, ideal lighting. The 3D data can even be reproduced on a computer.”

RC