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At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book—one page at a time, by hand.
(files.catbox.moe)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Wow that seems painfully slow/tedious. Why isn't it automatized? I think I saw a robot do like 20 pages a second on a yt some years ago.
Do you remember the results of those speed scans? Crooked pages, parts of the document cut off, blurry scans, etc.
It was a lazy method that resulted in a lot of junk data.
I think this is what I saw. Not quite 20 pages/s hahah and also a different method.
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Google have digitised a lot of books using some more advanced tech, though they started out with something a little like this.
What happened to that in the end? I heard they wanted to digitize the worlds books and then it just petered out at some point and heard nothing about it. Did they continue or was it spun to Internet Archive to do?
My understanding is the project led into Google Books. Google fought many legal cases and ultimately won but their enthusiasm to scan more books seems to have waned. Google basically convinced judges that by only letting people see a few pages, it fell under fair use, but then that meant you didn't get a giant library because you couldn't read the whole book.
There's an article about it here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-of-university-library-books
Also see https://www.hathitrust.org/about/ which is mentioned in the article.
That would be interesting to see!
This is probably the method that gives you the best quality (deskewing, lighting) without cutting the back of the book and feeding it into a scanner. (AFAIK)
I saw a book scanner similar to this one that used a vacuum to turn pages but otherwise same principle.