Physical books and printouts
Point a camera at a printed page and read it into the same system as everything else.
Point any webcam at a printed page and CogniPage reads along with you, so paperbacks and textbooks feed the same flashcards, assessments, recall schedule and knowledge map as everything on your screen.
Setting up
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Create a material for the book
In Materials, press Add material and name it as you would want to find it later — "Atomic Habits — Ch. 3" is better than "book".
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Open the scanner and allow the camera
Your operating system asks for camera permission the first time. The camera is active only while the scanner is open.
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Frame the page
A legibility meter under the preview scores the current frame and tells you what to fix — move closer, hold steadier, get more light. Wait for it to read well before capturing.
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Choose how to capture
Automatic captures each new page as you read and turn, skipping pages it has already seen. Snap takes one page per press, for when you only want a passage.
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Read
Captured pages appear in the panel beside the preview and land in the material as segments. Close the scanner when you are done — the camera stops with it.
Getting a good read
Diffuse light beats a bright lamp: glare on glossy paper is the most common cause of a poor read.
One page, roughly filling the preview. Two pages at once halves the resolution on each.
Hold the spine open. A steep angle bends the lines of text and confuses recognition.
A stand or a stack of books beats holding a laptop. The meter is unforgiving about motion blur.
What happens to a scanned page
Recognition runs on your device. The text is kept and appended to the material; the image is discarded. From there a hard-copy material behaves exactly like any other — it can be turned into flashcards, quizzed, and it appears in your analytics, marked with a Hard copy badge so you can tell where it came from.
The frame is read for text and thrown away — nothing is written to disk, and nothing is transmitted. This feature is entirely optional and entirely manual: it runs only while you have the scanner open.