"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:

Recently, "book scanners" carrying Hanwang e-Excerpter pens have appeared in bookstores in Zhongguancun. They are employing a brand-new method of taking the best parts of the books home with them. In addition, their reading techniques have changed. The resource pen can effectively reconcile the contradiction between high book prices and people's demand for reading material, saving readers a considerable amount of money and turning book-reading from "reading for the nobility" to "reading for the common people."

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.