Book Scanning Goes High-Tech

Mar. 11 -- Almost overnight, the Bay Area has become the center of yet another new technology business: book scanning. At dozens of locations from Richmond to Palo Alto, thousands of books are being converted to computer files 24 hours a day -- thousands each week. While publishers fear it, librarians cheer it -- as the next step in card catalogs.

A quarter of a million books have been digitized in the US and Canada -- the majority this year, and the majority from libraries. Every week, Google alone hauls whole shelves of them to an undisclosed location. The top librarians love it, because it's all about the search.

Paul LeClerc, President NY Public Library: "And I used to think the World Wide Web was a huge revolution, comparable to Gutenberg. But what I now think was authentically revolutionary and as transformative as Gutenberg were search engines."

Well, some authors view the new copiers as thieves. Commercial scanners such as Amazon and Google insist the whole point is not to sell what they scan.

Adam Smith, Google Books: "We view this as an evolution of the card catalog, and assisting people to find books that are of interest to them, and books that they may not have otherwise found through traditional finding means."

What Google won't help you find is the contraption they use to do that scanning. To see one, you have to come to an ex- military base, San Francisco's Presidio, to the Internet Archive.

High resolution digital cameras can actually be faster then standard scanners. We have two cameras pointed at our test pages, and with the click of a mouse, you can scan them both in the blink of an eye."

The archive has a dozen of these running, almost 24 hours a day, at 5,000 books per month. As a public service.

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive: "The big picture is we've got the opportunity to do something of historic proportions, which is universal access to all published works - all books, all music, all video. Some of it will be for free, some of it will be for pay."

All of which is compelling libraries to reinvent themselves.

Book sales have declined every year this decade. Still, one out of three books sold in the world, are sold in the United States.

More information:

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive offers online access to books, movies, videos, music at no cost. It currently has 85 billion web pages archived.