Looking for device to read physical books

I know I'm gonna get some negativity for this, but if you have a pair, I would recommend Meta smart glasses. Ever since they added the ability to have things described briefly or with detail, I have found that reading my snail mail on my own has been a huge blessing on my independence. You see, I am not ashamed to admit that I used to have a friend come over and read my mail to me.
There's no reason why you can't have Meta smart glasses read a physical book, be it hardcover or paperback. It's all a matter of positioning the book just right, and making sure that you are in a comfortable position. In other words, don't be hunched over a countertop, or table, and try to read a book this way. That's OK for mail, which is typically as little as a single page, and no more than five or six pages.
For a full book though, you might earn yourself a nice backache.

HTH.

I forget that you guys over there don't get the full Monty when it comes to the Meta smart glasses. I do have a question, do you have the ability to go into your Meta AI application, and go all the way over to the accessibility heading under your SmartGlass settings, and choose between brief and detailed descriptions? I have mindset to detailed, and it makes reading documents etc. far more informative.
Also, I too am saving up for the Oakley vanguards. I have been wanting a pair of wrap-around smart glasses for a while now.

Assuming you don't want to do the old college hack of chopping the spine off the book and dumping the pages in a sheet fed scanner... A document camera may be your best bet? Ipevo is one such brand, there are many now. They are essentially cameras on a stand so the camera is held overhead.

You could always get a flatbed scanner and use your computer.

If you do this, you’ll have a few options. I know that some scanners now come with software that will OCR What you read. If you’re a JAWS user, you can use their OCR. If you’re an NVDA user, I’m sure they have an OCR add on. I am certified in NVDA, but I don’t use it often enough to know if they do. I should look that up. If you’re a Mac or Windows user, you could buy Abby Fine Reader. Finally, I don’t know of anyone who has used this program since it belonged to Serotec, but there is Docuscan+ https://pneumasolutions.com/docuscan/ is the URL.

The echo vision glasses by agiga seem like a valuable purchase. They are built with the visually impaired and blind in mind. And there’s plenty of videos of them scanning and quickly reading a page out of a book. They are just about to be released.

Take a chance on them see how it goes.

Also, I don’t understand what the following means. “ I also feel that a book unread is a stupid book... Or the person who bought it is stupid... Or something.”

Best of luck to you on your journey, Oliver. Personally, I am happy with Kindle and Audible, and similar forms of media for book consumption. If I did not have near senseless fingertips, I would go back to Braille for books...
Oh, and hey, if you do decide on the Echo Vision, do let us know how those work out for you. 😎

One thing you might consider is that supposedly in their next update, JAWS users are going to have access to the Microsoft natural voices. I daren't guess how many or if there will be any limitations, but one option you might could try is to use Bookshare and let JAWS and Microsoft do the reading for you. Yeah, yeah, I know, physical media and all. But I am just throwing that option out there. And speaking of, I know that Bookshare has an Alexa skill. I can't speak to the quality of the voices, but if you have an Alexa speaker, that might be somethign to think about. Oh, and that gives me a really evil idea. ... I wonder if I could get Eloquence to activate Alexa. Just the weird ideas my mind conjures. Sometimes I scare myself.

Good luck, Sir Oliver.

As far as frictionless goes--well, less frictional, let's say--we're not at all far off from OCR via chatbots or agents. Microsoft used to allow uploading pdfs to copilot, which was the only time I could actually accurately know what was in the tables on my utility bill. Last time I tried it, the PDF wasn't an upload option. The ABBY Fine Reader Engine now uses an LLM, so other paid agent subscriptions might already be a great companion to an iphone camera stand. I think only A.I. can be virtually 100% accurate. I have hundreds upon hundreds of books I scanned using various OCR programs over the years, and I would never read fiction through those, and there's plenty of garbled text, even at 99% accuracy, so no book was what I would call enjoyable. Of course, they were academic literature, so they're not meant to be enjoyed.

I would say that the Meta glasses no matter what comes out are not really worthwhile. They don’t really do a good job. Echo vision seems like it’s working towards really benefiting the blind community. I don’t know that it’ll be outdated anytime soon. I do think that sometime late next year into early 2027, we will probably get a sense of what the Apple glasses are going to be like and that might be interesting. Some people like the envision glasses that are coming out. I’m not crazy about them. I do think the Google glasses using Google XR could be interesting though

This thing is still on sale as far as I know, and hopefully unlike openbook it's aged better.
I haven't heard any review about it yet, good or bad.
@Brian: I was the same, but since kindle actively fights against local copies of book, and audible according to my gut feeling will probably start doing the same sooner or later, I avoid them as much as possible now.
Only in the US do we have drm even on nls content, elsewhere it's not protected or way less agressive like bookshare, and through abcglobalbooks we can thus access a ton of content.

This is purely my opinion regarding the upcoming Apple glasses. My guess is that they will be more expensive than most, of not all, of the glasses previously mentioned in this post. The reason? They have the Apple brand name. No real point to this post; just jotting down my thoughts.

It's decent, the motion detection is good and it recognizes pretty well. That's particularly true if you do stuff with larger books, e.g. scan a page at a time, scan then slide the book over, and mask the opposite page with a blank sheet of paper.

That having been said, it only works on Windows, and though there's a driver to make it work with other stuff, e.g. KNFB Reader or whatever it's called now, I never did get it to work with anything other than Openbook.

However, there are scanning stands for your phone that will essentially turn it into an overhead camera. This is the one I know about, but I can dig up a thing with more after supper.

https://www.scanjig.com/

So pair that with a decent scanning app, something like VD Scan, probably not one of the free AIs, and you can use your phone like an overhead document camera like the PEARL.

Here's a list.

https://www.turner42.com/ScanningStands.html

Here's one from the Braille Bookstore.

http://www.braillebookstore.com/Mobile-Phone-Scanning-Stand.1

Finally, there's this one, but their site isn't working now, even though it did like a minute ago.

https://en.ceciaa.com/scanbox-vision.html

For scanning books, you'll want somebody to take a look at it and make sure it either doesn't have sides on the right and left, or that it's big enough to scan any books you'll want to use it with. I know I have some hardcovers that are pretty wide.

The PEARL sits on this sort of triangular base plate and then has an arm that sticks forward with the camera at the end, so it's all open. Some of these stands sound like they're enclosed boxes, which means only certain books will fit in them.

Please note I've never used one of these to scan a book. They're pretty cheap though, so if you have scanning software for your phone that will do batch scanning, two pages at once, and possibly motion detection so you don't have to keep tapping the phone, it might be a cheap thing to try before worrying about getting a document camera to hook up a desktop with whatever scanning software you've got.

Hi,
A flatbed scanner in conjunction with a good OCR program really is the way to go here. I used Kurzweil 1000 years ago to scan books and it worked really well. It was so easy in terms of practicality. I could put each page flat and then just go. I could do two pages at a time, and even batch scanning, but I never tried that. I never liked the idea of a camera. I know you can put it on a stand, but that just sounded much too fiddly to me. I don't know what a good program is for OCR these days, I mean in terms of scanning physical books because I only scan PDFs. I know FineReader is still around, I had a bad experience with it but I was scanning a French PDF, even though I set the language to French it came out horrible. But it'll probably be fine for English though. and you might want to check out the suggestions above too.

I also posted this on Mastodon after seeing your question here.
I’m honestly surprised how many people suggest using smart glasses for scanning and reading physical books. The idea sounds futuristic: hold each page in front of your glasses and let them scan and read it aloud. But is that really practical for a 300-page book? Can the glasses capture the entire page accurately? What about battery life? And how would you get a proper Word, PDF, or Epub file out of it? Can you even make sure the AI behind the glasses doesn’t summarize the text instead of saving or reading it in full?
There are still so many questions, and honestly, these devices feel more suited to reading business cards, menus, or magazine snippets than to doing full book OCR. Dedicated scanners like the Plustek Opticbook are still being made, and nothing beats them when combined with good OCR software such as the stand-alone ABBYY FineReader or even Kurzweil 1000 or OpenBook, if you still have a license for the last two. There are also camera-based text scanners with stands, but my own experience with the Opticbook has been much better. You can even scan without breaking the spine of your book:
https://plustek.com/us/products/index.php?products=book-scanners
The bigger question now is, in the age of Amazon Kindle, Audible, Apple Books, and Bookshare, how often do we actually scan physical books anymore? Is it really worth buying an Opticbook 3800 and a new OCR license for just a few books a year? Of course, we often buy things that end up being used less than we imagine. But a flatbed scanner takes space on the desk, and when it’s not used much, it tends to stand out and even bother you a bit.
I haven’t used my old Opticbook 3600 in years, and that model isn’t made anymore. But back then, I used to scan several books a week, and nothing matched the joy of turning a physical book into a clean, readable text file. After using HP and Canon scanners, the Opticbook felt revolutionary. It brought back great memories of Kurzweil 1000, Stephen Baum, and the alpha tester group. Today, Kurzweil 1000 feels as much a part of history as the Opticbook does for most of us.

Kudos to Tara for recommending the flat-bed scanner option along with an OCR app. Her suggestions mirror what I wrote in my previous message.

Unfortunately Kindle and text E books are not popular in my country, so I have a Plustek Opticbook 4800 scanner. Like an other poster, I also surprised by how many people recommend reading a book with AI. Sounds very featuristic to me. Sure, scanning a book is not easy, especially when we are talking about Brandon Sanderson's books, but it has been the most trustworthy method for years. Maybe the only problem is that fine reader for mac, unfortunately, doesn't get the etention it neads from the developer and I don't know any other good scanning and OCR app for Mac.

I guess the hope with the likes of the Meta glasses, particularly when they open up to third party apps, is that it won’t necessarily need to be AI at all. It can be an app like VD scan or another OCR app taking advantage of the form factor 🤞
ave

I mean, they're great and all, but cameras are pretty awesome too. Often faster. I've used Freedom Scientific's Pearl and my wife's done some scanning with a phone, with Microsoft Office Lens I think, and it's worked pretty well. Usually the scanning stands have a cutout or things you fix in place once you have the phone set up, so it's pretty easy to place it. So I mean, I guess unflattening the stand could take a couple of seconds. But once the stand's open you pretty much set the phone on top of it.

The one problem I could see with a phone is if you have to repeatedly go to the touch screen, e.g. if whatever you're using has no batch scanning and motion detection option, so you have to keep interacting with the phone. But I mean, when the Pearl works, you get a scan in like a second, it takes the picture and gets your two pages at a time, then you flip the page and do it again.

All you're doing is holding the book open, as opposed to pressing it down on the flatbed scanner, some people claim you could just put the lid down but that never worked for me. I'm not arguing against flatbeds mind you, they're great. I'm just saying, if a camera works properly, they're pretty awesome too. They tend to be faster and, on the whole, less intensive work.

Disclaimer: I scan my books as books. I've heard of some people taking books apart and scanning pages on a flatbed or sending them through a document feeder, and that's horrifying to me. So if you do that, maybe you get amazing scanning speeds or something. But I'd rather keep my books in tact, myself.

I came across this thread and thought that there were many good suggestions.

Sounds just like the old days when bookshare started and people scanned in their own books and shared them with other people.

Then I thought, "Scan books? Haven't all of these books already been scanned? Why scan them again?" Andk, if they haven't been scanned, most books are already available in digital format so that you can read them many different ways: speech, braille, large print, audio, etc.

The problem I see with using something like the Meta glasses is how to easily scan back a sentence or word, and/or quickly navigate to the next chapter or section without turning a bunch of pages and doing AI on each page.

Once a book is scanned and in digital format, one can do almost anything with it.

Anyway, those are just my random thoughts. We really have it pretty good these days compared to how things were before all of these technologies became available for us.

--Pete

We could still be doing what they were doing nearly a century ago, scanning books onto vinyl records, and listening to about 15 minutes of speech per side.
Good times...

I don’t remember the books on the vinyl records. The most thing I remember, was having all those cassette tapes with those big clunky tape machines they couldn’t even record anything on them. They were just book players. The only thing that I really liked with those is that they were able to play both kinds of tapes. And technically, if we’re scanning books in order to have them read to us later aren’t those also a form of some kind of audiobook? Just throwing that out there. I think if it were me, I would still want to read something maybe just feel like the native books app or something. Although I have yet to figure out how to use that. I think it would be fun to have Karen or Samantha read me a book. Those are my two favorite voices. I wouldn’t even care which variant was to read it. I would just do it anyway. I have like literally zero interest in any kind of smart glasses, but that’s also because I don’t wear glasses and I’ve been too blind since birth. I still think this is a really cool topic though.

The library service in the US used to do them before cassettes, and while they were still going, I think they stopped sending me records in the mid-eighties. I've read, let's see, braille, books on records, (both solid and flexi-discs), eight-track tapes, (nobody will remember those), cassettes, CDs, modern audio books and lots of things with screen readers and various programs.

If you think all the books are digital, you haven't been looking hard enough. I'm pretty sure most of the books I own aren't even available in an electronic format, let alone accessibly. I should really figure out a scanning solution for the Mac and get back to going through them.

What a few folks seem to be missing here is that the post is asking for a way to read a physical book. I have a lot of digital books too but there are plenty on my shelf I would badly like to read, such as a few Making Of art books, that have no digital version and are formatted such that pointing my phone at them would be impossible.

The only thing close to what would work that's been suggested so far is way to flimsy to hold a large coffee table book. From everything I've seen in this thread so far, it looks like anyone who wants to read their print books without tearing them apart is out of luck these days. (And I mean read, not have summarized by the Mark Zuckerberg on your face.)

That would be strange if some day the scholars and experts have to go to Oliver for a digital copy of a rare physical book that got stolen or destroyed because he was one of a handful of people in the world who bothered to read it...
It's very useful to me to be able to interrogate an AI description of a picture. I was going through a physical photo album yesterday, for example, and I used two sheets of paper to isolate a couple of the photos and ask very specific questions. Taking the picture with the phone is a pain, and the AI gets distracted by things other than the picture. I could have scanned it on the flatbed scanner, but I would have to move the stack of things on top of it.
The roof or house shaped jig sounds like a very good idea. Perhaps, only the frame of a house with moveable, steel supports for various sizes of books, and something that completely folds up and won't accumulate things on top of it.

@Magic Retina No. With the Opticbook line of scanners there's no need to tear books apart.

If you have a really huge book, you might need sighted help, e.g. if it won't fit within a scanning stand/you can't line it up. But what you do with larger books like that is scan a page at a time and mask the other page with a blank piece of paper.

So I'll use the Pearl as an example. It sits on a base and the camera sticks out about a foot on an arm above the base. The front of the base is a metal bar with a bump in the middle. If your book is small enough, you line the center, between the two pages, up with that bump. If your book is bigger, you line the center up with one of the edges, we're assuming we're starting with the lefthand page. So you line the center up with the right edge. Your blank piece of paper covers the right hand page.

You scan/take a picture, then you move your book over so the center is aligned with the left edge, or so that the right edge of the book and the right edge of the base match up, take your pick. Move your masking piece of paper over to the left page that you already scanned, and take your picture. Flip pages, move the book back to the first position, and repeat.

I don't know how that would work out with a scanning stand and a phone, this is why I mentioned getting somebody to look at the stand. But if the stand has open sides, I don't see why it wouldn't work too, unless of course the book is too big for the stand front to back or it's just too large for the camera's field of view and you have to scan the pages in sections or something. That's where the sighted help would come in then. But this is why I'm talking about cameras, not because they're so much better than flatbeds necessarily, but because they let you do things that you need really large and expensive flatbed scanners for otherwise.

Oh and of course, if your stand is open front to back, you could flip this, the book would lie with the pages vertically and you'd scan one and move it either forward or backward. The nice thing about this is that you can probably try it fairly cheaply with a phone, an OCR program, and a stand. If it doesn't work out you're only out the money for the stand and the program, and in fact, you could probably use one of the free AI ones just to make sure it would recognize whole pages or something before buying a dedicated program that would handle books and batch scanning and such properly.

Oh and I am with Oliver a hundred percent. There is all kinds of stuff out there that is either not digitized, or if it is, it's not in an accessible format. SOmetimes if it is, it's not *fully* digitized. Here's an example.

https://sacred-texts.com/egy/ebod/index.htm

Now, this is awesome. I get to read this. But I know that there's a section of interlinear translation, which means there's a line of hieroglyphics and then a line of English translation below it. The English translation is much more literal and does things like follow the word order of the hieroglyphics, IIRC. That means it's not readable/literate late 19th century English, like the main translation that's scanned there. I totally understand why he left it out, but notice he says this isn't a problem, because the book's still in print.

There are probably more modern translations and such, if I really want to dig into this, and we've probably found out more about the language and all since Budge's translation. But my point is, assuming I'm interested in knowing *something* about Ancient Egyptian, and if you can't tell by the example above I'm that kind of nerd, well here's a place I could find something out, except I can't, because we don't get that part of the book, even though what we *do* get is perfectly accessible. And I'm not knocking it at all, it is absolutely wonderful that we have access to this, and I totally understand the decision and why it was made.

Look for overhead phone scanner on Amazon and you'll find quite a number. I got this one: https://a.co/d/jhPEYHj

It has a spring arm action, a clamp to hold it on any surface, the phone can be angled in any direction, and it has a built-in LED light with Rechargeable battery.
I clamped it to a side table that I can swing over my easy chair. I have scanned some magazines with it. Haven't tried books yet, but I'm sure it would be just fine as long as I was comfortable. I used seeing AI with page detection, on and works really well changing pages and automatically scanning.
It cost about C$35

Disadvantage is initial set up to line the camera up or the phone up. I should say. Once you got it all set up and everything tightened it mostly stays in place, but you can unfortunately shove it out of line if you pushed hard on it. I tried some other devices and found this to work the best for me so far.

I also used it with a Bluetooth button that's designed to activate the camera so I don't have to touch the phone. That button came with a different phone holder that was a gooseneck that wrapped around my neck.It wasn't very comfortable and too easy to move when I move my body. I like the stand better. I wonder if it's possible to buy a Bluetooth button That will activate the camera by itself.

You can get remotes for the iPhone camera. The one I have is about the size of a thumb drive with a picture button and a pairing button on the front and an on/off switch on the side, runs off a coin cell battery, and I keep it on a lanyard to wear like a necklace. Seeing AI does not work with a remote, and I suspect most other apps, outside the Camera app, don't either.
I much prefer the remote for taking pictures because it doesn't shake the camera, but that probably doesn't matter much for reading.

I got this thing, from a company called Satechi.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VF1VJRB

It's a bit expensive, but it has two modes, one that does media, and one that, well I'm not sure what it's for, but it let's you move around the screen. So it's just like swiping and tapping with Voiceover. You can get to whatever button you want on the screen and then hit the center button to activate it.

It does navigate by row, so you can't just hit the right button for instance, you'll have to hit up or down too, in order to move through apps or whatever. But in that mode, it hsould work with anything. As an example, if I'm in something like Audible and I'm in the media mode, the center button plays and pauses or stops, like you'd expect.

But if I'm in the other mode, I can use it to get back to the library to get to the rewind control or whatever, and then activate it with the center button. I got it to use with Bard for doing music stuff, because it's annoying to have to stop guitar or keyboard or whatever and fiddle with the phone. At least here I get physical buttons, so it's generally faster to find them and get to whatever on the screen, e.g. to rewind or change speed or whatever.

That's cool.
I've used a bluetooth keyboard and ear phone combo kind of like that to take closeup critter pictures, like at feeding trays. I can put the focus on the camera view finder and wait out of view for something to happen, even turn the phone off for a while, then back on if something does show up.
I think maybe the document detection with Seeing AI might be a little smoother than hunting around the screen with a bluetooth device though.
I've never tried it, but you could probably use a cheap tripod and put a book between its legs to read or scan.

Yep, that would work too. But just like with that, you don't have to hunt around, well you might if you turn the phone off and back on. You just leave it on whatever button, and then it's there. And like a BT keyboard, well let's say you're on rewind in Bard, and you want to move to play, one to the right. On a keyboard, assuming quick nav is on, you'd hit right arrow and then up and down to activate. On this remote anyway, you'd hit the right button, then the center button to activate. Same thing really. On the remote what essentially acts as the arrows is in a square with a button in the center, so pretty typical remote kind of arrangement.

But yeah, essentially, in the mode that manipulates Voiceover, it acts like you have quick nav turned on, and you get the four arrows, and a button to activate, so like pressing up and down at the same time. So obviously you could do more, and do it more easily, with a keyboard. I assume you could type with the remote but it would involve moving to each letter and then probably pushing the center button, so sort of like you were on the screen and double-tapping each letter.

So kind of annoying. But it's a way smaller form factor than a keyboard. It's totally a convenience thing and entirely unnecessary. But then, so are the single button camera remotes, because again, you could do that with a keyboard too, you know because you've done it already! I should figure out how to use it with the Mac, I see it says you can in the novel-length title of the item, just to see what it can do.

I don't know for sure if this is possible, but the Hable One might be able to interface with things like Seeing AI better than the average bluetooth remote if only because it is a full phone control that is built with us in mind. But I mostly use mine as a very portable keyboard so can't speak to how well it works as a phone controller.

Thank you for the phone stand recommendation, I will check that out to see if it might suit my needs. I live alone in a tiny apartment, there is no space for any kind of scanner in here haha.

Hable is kind of like braille screen input if it were a physical keyboard. It has six braille keys and two more keys, one on either side of the cell for space and delete. You can do a lot of things with easy combinations of the keys.

Hi,
So thanks for the info from everyone above about different cameras on stands. I actually like the idea of being able to read a book with a pair of smart glasses. I mean, I wouldn't even need to save any of the pages as text files on any of my devices or keep any of the text anywhere. I could just read it wearing a pair of glasses just like someone sighted would sit reading with glasses. But as people asked above, would it be able to read a whole page, or would it sumarise? Apparently the Ally Solos will be able to read a whole page, so we'll see. All the books I want are available as an eBook, but reading a physical newspaper would be nice though.