Thread by @textfiles

After "What is the life and experience of a human scanner", the biggest reaction seems to be "Why is a human there, why not a machine". Solid question, but in the 20 years of doing this book scanning, I can assure you if a machine could do something, it's doing it. Not here.

People then link to a panopoly of robotic scanning examples, videos, one-sheets and demonstration pages for commercial or industrial scanning setups that turn the pages. Some of them we've been linked to for almost a decade, so we're pretty familiar with them! And they're neat!

In most cases, you have to calibrate the book for scanning. This process can take a while, and has to shift for each book. If every book was the same size/consistency, it'd be fine. But every book is not. Some are fragile. Others are thick.

And... I don't know how to tell you this, but some of these solutions over the years will tell you how "very very few" of the pages are destroyed in the process. Since we're going to be holding these books in physical storage, we kind of need "very very few" to be "none".

This is part of the whole deal - we need the books to be 'non-destroyed' in the mechanism of scanning them. We don't de-bind, we don't separate pages (although some books we scan are really fragile and need to be carefully turned) and we don't toss them when done.

"Wait... you keep them all?"

Ha ha yes

"So wait... you mean you just... have... millions of books?"

ha ha YES

So, believe me, if we honestly thought we could buy a flip-o-matic 4000 and set it loose into this system, we'd have done it YESTERDAY. LAST WEEK.

But right now, in the aggregate, with a lot of people doing this as their full-time job, this is the best way. Humans, and pages.

Adding one last tweet that should have been in there. Some of the solutions are very good indeed, but they're prohibitively expensive, and you STILL need to have someone place the book in, watch it, fix errors, and be nearby. You pay a galactic amount up front, for little gain.