Wikipedia says Google is using a special camera that’s able to scan books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour, which doesn’t sound bad at all (I am talking about Google Books of course, the company’s online collection of digitized books ). But now a team at the elite University of Tokyo has announced the development of  a device that can scan a 1,000-page book in four minutes.

The core component of the device is a high-speed camera that can make 500 shots in a single second and is based on infrared laser technology. Users are required to manually flip the pages under the camera, which then makes shots of the print material. The device is able to scan everything that’s printed on paper, from character written in latin or other languages to graphs or photos.

The researchers say they hope to sell the technology to libraries or publishers and rely on cooperations with copy machine makers to market the device.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]