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Intellectual Property
New adventures in book piracyPosted by Joel Martinsen, August 3, 2007 7:03 AM
 "Scanning books is stealing. Scanning pens prohibited." The e摘客, or "e-Excerpter", is a handheld scanner manufactured by Hanwang, a Chinese OCR company. Suggested retail price is 2600 yuan for the version with 20M memory and 8.7M storage, and 1980 for the 12M/3M version. Hanwang advertising promotes the scanning pen as a time-saver, a way to extract important information from documents without resorting to hand-copying, and a means of transporting large volumes of text in a convenient, 90-gram package. The pen's multi-language translation is also a big selling point. However, an article that Hanwang dealers submitted to tech news site eNet last month plays up the rising cost of books:
Hence the anxiety of the bookseller pictured above - according to China News, many stores in the Jintailu Wholesale Book Market in Beijing's Chaoyang District have similar signs posted. On the other hand, at a scan rate of just 8-10 characters a second (or under a page a minute), there doesn't seem to be much of a threat of large-scale pen-aided theft going on. Links and Sources
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Comments on New adventures in book piracy
Today at the BuyNow electronics mall in Chaoyang there was someone demoing a pen scanner, though not Hanwang's particular model. It looked pretty good, actually - it could scan both traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese, English (and other Euro languages with the correct dictionaries installed), and had simple translation capabilities on the pen itself. I could see it being pretty useful for scanning titles and short excerpts when I'm away from my desk, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to spend 1500 yuan on it (this off-brand was cheaper than Hanwang).
And did the pen perform? I was having lunch with a friend a while back and he'd arranged for a Hanwang salesperson to come to the restaurant we were at and try and convince him it was worth that price. All we had was an English book to scan, but it was all pretty sad results. The guy was serious, professional and very informed about the product, but when it came down to the pen hitting the paper, it just wouldn't work, and we had even less luck with the translation function.
It looked like it worked OK, but it may have been just that the person doing the demonstration had really good patter. She showed how it could scan in both directions, and then pointed out that a few Qs and Js were evidence that this pen was better than the competition, which would garble the whole line.
Performance on English text seemed much worse than on Chinese. Wonder why that is.