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Comment by Onavo | Hacker News Reader

> Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable.

That's how Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Amazon (their book preview feature) operated before ebooks were common. It's not scalable-in-a-garage but perfectly scalable for a commercial operation.

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We hem and haw about metaphorical "book burning" so much we forget that books themselves are not actually precious.

The books that are destroyed in scanning are a small minority compared to the millions discarded by libraries every year for simply being too old or unpopular.

>we forget that books themselves are not actually precious.

Book burnings are symbolic (Unless you're in the world of Fareinheit 451). The real power comes from the political threat, not the fact that paper with words on them is now unreadable.

The real power comes from the purging of knowledge from institutions that can keep that knowledge alive. Facts, ideas and histories can all be incinerated.

Well, the famous 1933-05-10 book burning did destroy the only copies of a lot of LGBT medical research, and destroying the last copy of various works was a stated intent of Nazi book burnings.

I remember them having a 3D page unwarping tech they built as well so they could photograph rare and antique books without hacking them apart.

No, that's not how Google Books did it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Scanning_of_books

I don't think Google Books scanner chopped off the spine. https://linearbookscanner.org/ is the open design they released.

Oh I didn't know that. That's wild

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