It's no big news that Google does some really cool stuff - be it getting goats to graze on their lawns instead of using a lawn-mower or rigging up some kind of infra-red contraption to scan books without opening them. While most of us may not be able to get goats to graze in our backyards, we would all find plenty of use for a portable camera book scanner.
First it was e-publishing and Kindle that was threatening the survival of the old fashioned book but with such a device, every customer browsing in a bookstore could mean lost revenue instead of a potential sale. Yet in every innovation that promises to be the death of the old way, there is often hidden opportunity waiting to be discovered and monetized. Inside a book-scanner there may be ways to generate buzz for goods and services relevant to text being scanned - and that is just the most obvious idea. It would only be a matter of time before much better ones came along.
