So, what’s to be done with all those books cluttering up your apartment/house? 

You ditched your C.D. collection years ago, converting everything to digital and loading up your iPod, but those pesky books,  they’re everywhere!  From the bedroom to the living room, you’re using them as coasters, as an end table, maybe to even out an off kilter table.  Hell, there’s even a couple sitting on the back of the toilet tank!

What can you do? 

• Call the good folks at HGTV’s Misson: Organization?
• Rent out a storage unit?
• Maybe build a fort in the yard? 

Well, lucky for you, there’s no need to go to such extremes.  The good folks at Ion Audio have the answer to your problem.  Scan it!

Debuting at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, the Ion Audio Book Saver promises to do for the world of books what the home P.C. did for your C.D. collection. Simply put, it’s a super fast photo scanner, optimized to scan print and store it on an SD card in digital form.  From there, it’s a virtual hop, skip and a jump, and there you go, the book is now a pdf file on the computer available to be uploaded to your eReader of choice.  Ion Audio claims their scanner can scan 2 pages per second (they claim similar products can only scan one page every seven seconds) using two cameras and a flash while the book sits comfortably in an angled cradle.  The only thing that slows down the process is the operator; pages do have to be flipped by hand after all.

Promoted as a quick way to convert your books, comics or magazines to a digital format, the Book Saver is projected to cost about $150 U.S. (and I would imagine slightly higher in Cdn funds).  It is also projected to cost the textbook publishing industry much more than that.  Vito Pilieci’s  January 13 article in The National Post outlines some of the copyright issues the advent of the Book Saver might have. 

Just like the music industry was ravaged by digital piracy, there are fears that the publishing industry might undergo the same trials.  After all, in the case of textbooks, why would everyone in the class pay full price for a textbook when they can pay their entrepreneurial friend (who has a Book Saver) a discounted price? 

However, this leads to the next question: what if the book is out of print?  Does the publisher really have a legal right to intellectual property that they’re not willing or able to disseminate?  I suspect the lawyers will be busy for years with questions of copyright and who owns what.

My point of view: I bought the book.  I own the book.  I’m going to convert the book and save myself some space around the house.

 (For a neat demonstration video of the Book Saver, check out this video on youtube)