At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, ION Audio introduced a device that should strike fear in the hearts of publishers: a consumer-grade book scanner that can create e-books at a rate of one page per second.

Set to go on sale this spring at an expected retail price of $150 (U.S.), the scanner is outfitted with two overhead cameras that simultaneously photograph the pages of an open book, which rests on an angled cradle. Described by ION Audio as an “e-reader conversion system for printed materials,”  the ironically named Book Saver “promises to shake the publishing industry in the same way CD burners shook the music industry and forever changed copyright laws in the early 1990s,” says the National Post.

The Post goes on to highlight the paradigm-shifting repercussions of the device in the context of Canadian copyright law:

The Book Saver device […] arrives as Canada is once again trying to amend outdated copyright legislation to better address the digital era.

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A key question in the current round of talks is whether consumers have any right to make personal copies of DVDs, e-books and video games for personal use.