Reading books is hard enough as it is. They're often long, boring and some don't even have any pictures in them. I decided to at least eliminate the physical effort of turning pages and constructed this little device:
At the moment it's not entirely automatic as I'm still controlling the individual motors manually (via Bluetooth from my phone, which is off-screen, because I'm also using it to shoot the video). The setup requires some tweaking for the exact size of the book and probably only works for a certain range of pages in the middle of the book. It also still sometimes grabs more than one page. But hey, it's a start. There's obviously room for improvement, for example it would be nice to be able to turn the pages in both directions. (
Update: Here's an updated version that does that.)