Hi all,
The design of the scanner is such that each press of the button captures two pages simultaneously. 100-some pages per hour - as quoted above- is ridiculous. It does not take one minute to turn a page. Even if it did, that would be 200 pages an hour.
. Personally, for me, it takes on average 1.5 to 2 seconds per page turn. You can do the math.
People on my forum regularly report 600-800 pages per hour on the scanner, 400 page books on a speed run take, on average, 15-20 minutes end to end. Some people on my forum report 1200PPH, though I believe that to be near an absolute maximum. People gotta pee, eat, and drink. People make mistakes. Occasionally a page needs to be captured twice.
Now, of course the photo-images of pages require some post-processing which takes time. But the capture stage is what requires your attention.
In general,
IF it is possible to destructively scan a book, then that is the most
economical option. However economics aren't everything. Many of us do not wish to destroy our books, and would like control of the ebook creation process, as well as solid backup of the page images, so that as new technologies come along, we can improve our ebook libraries and shift into new formats.
Over 3000 people have worked with me on this project, improving the hardware and software, and it's in use all over the world, and in several commercial and government scanning operations, and I've dedicated quite a bit of my life to offering kits to get things to the next stage of development. So I also disagree with HarryT that it is of no real commercial practicality, even if it is by definition concerned with all the cases not addressed by the big players.
My goal is to put one of these things in every hacker-and-maker-space in the world, because, as people noted here, most people don't need to own one (and it's not economical to buy one) to digitize the small number of important books they already own. When it comes to book scanning equipment, access is more important than ownership.
However for people with bigger libraries and/or dreams of helping bring small communities, hospitals, and makerspaces into the digital age, it is just the thing.
Cheers all,
Daniel Reetz
www.diybookscanner.org