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Comment by magic_hamster | Hacker News Reader

This is very much a physical problem and there aren't too many shortcuts you can take.

I've been part of a preservation project and scanned a LOT of magazines. Generally, it doesn't matter much if you place it on a flat bed or not. Flipping the page manually takes a while either way.

There's already a known way for scanning magazines and books very fast: cut the spine and feed the pages to an automatic scanner. This is of course not applicable to anything you'd like to keep around after scanning, because your copy is destroyed.

All in all, the best way to automate scanning without destroying the item, will have to combine a top level camera with a machine to turn pages. I believe this is what was going on in Google's massive scanning project.

Maybe using x-ray could work for "scanning" some books without having to turn the pages. But I suppose there'll be a new set of problems to solve there.

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I recently saw some work from the University of Kentucky on reading the Herculaneum scrolls. These scrolls were carbonized by volcanic activity (Pompeii?) and obviously can't be unrolled without disintegrating. They used some interesting CT (xray) scanning plus machine learning to distinguish the carbon-based ink from the mostly carbon substrate and retrieve legible text.

Of course, that only gets you the printed text. You might lose notes and doodles in the margins, or other physical evidence. But, it's certainly promising for works that are too delicate to physically open and inspect

Printed text on _scrolls_?

RE "....There's already a known way for scanning magazines and books very fast: cut the spine and feed the pages to an automatic scanner. This is of course not applicable to anything you'd like to keep around after scanning, because your copy is destroyed......" I've always thought the pages could be rebound. Not perfect but a halfway solution.

I guess you could, but everything where you would even consider cutting the spine is probably not worth fixing afterwards. E.g. it's a contemporary magazine, where you could just buy 2 if you really need to keep a physical copy.

Cutting the spine and feeding it to the scanner is the most cost effective method for most modern books.

Most signatures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(bookbinding)) are glue bounded, not just sewn. Some use cases prefer/require the pages to be unbound because the printing goes all the way into the gutter and cutting the spine can also leave out some data. It's highly inneficient as you have to heat the spine carefully and then remove the glue residues. A tiny glue leftover can smear your autofeed scanner if not completely jam and tear the page. For a unique item, makes sense using a non-destructive scanning method, but for anything else, a carefully cut spine (or better yet, a bookbinding plow https://duckduckgo.com/?t=palemoon&q=bookbinding+plow&iax=im... ) leave a perfect cut and the loose pages can be kept in a ziplog bag for any future reference.

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