I'm a frequent library user, and this may be fine for certain types of collections (where you look for very specific books) but is terrible for general use, as you are removing the ability to search by topic.

I guess the idea is that books naturally fall next to other similar books, a kind of "People who read this also read..." system.

I can understand the experiment, the dewey-decimal system doesn't have to be the ultimate in organisation.

It could certainly slow searching by topic (since patrons are remixing the books based on whatever way they're using them). It does seem to demand quite a bit of infrastructure, adding RFID scanners to every shelf (and keeping them working). If it truly would allow every book in the collection to be pinpointed in realtime, that would be a plus, many times the catalog can only tell you that the title you're looking for should be on the shelf, not where it has ended up.

How? One of the search terms could easily be topic...

right, and then you get listed the locations of 20 books on 20 shelves scattered around the library. Extremely fatiguing and time consuming if you want to skim a couple.

That's very cool! I thought it deserved its own post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266334

yes indeed, 1 up

sadly, this one very interesting aspect is buried down the spiffy but hardly useful table scanner.