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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

The FAQ on the linear book scanner site says the following,

"Prototype 1 could scan the majority of books without damage, but may tear one or two pages in some books. Out of 50 books tested, 45% had one or two of their pages either torn or folded. This is a very early prototype and there are many areas for improvement in the design."

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Ok, thanks. I read that, but I thought there might be some other, more dire reports of its use. I guess we just differ on what it means to destroy a book. When I read Jason's comment, it sounded like he was saying that the linear book scanner rendered the book unusable after scanning.

Look into commercial book scanners that use vacuums. This is a solved problem. Kirtas is one of those manufacturers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds63ZBXFdLM http://www.kirtas.com/

50 pages per hour with no damage to the books.

You're looking at $50k-$90k for the equipment plus $8k/year service contract, though. So you need to figure out whether book scanning is something that the Internet Archive is interested in, beyond this project.

I was over there yesterday morning helping sort and it seemed like the vast vast majority of the books were either ring binders or spiral bound and could easily be taken out of the binding to be scanned in a standard scanner.

I think that page-turning method is clever, but far too much like a reciprocating slicer/guillotine. Unless the pages are perfect, catch one in the gap and it'll get torn off or folded. Cameras are also much faster than traditional scanner-type sensors.

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