NPR reports on the patented scanner that Google invented to mass-digitize books without destroying them.
Given that I have recently learned that my book is being made available for free on Gigapedia, perhaps I shouldn’t think that is an absolutely amazing technological development. But I do.
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They do this manually at the moment — someone sits there and turns the pages of the book for the scanner to scan. In a few cases, when they didn’t move quickly enough, you can see the hand or finger of the page-turner on the page (e.g.).
How do those page turners resist the urge to flip the bird every now and again?
From Jeff Toobin’s New Yorker article:
“Google will not discuss its proprietary scanning technology, but, rather than investing in page-turning equipment, the company employs people to operate the machines, I was told by someone familiar with the process. “Automatic page-turners are optimized for a normal book, but there is no such thing as a normal book,” Clancy said. “There is a great deal of variability over books in a library, in terms of size or dust or brittle pages.”
Which raises the question: Which job is worse? Making 8 bucks an hour as a google book-scanner, or as a netflix envelope-stuffer (http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/08/23/netflix/)