Re:Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: The Traged...
by devoply on Saturday April 22, 2017 @10:18PM
(#14176086)
As someone who has looked into this quite a bit it's not difficult to do what Google Books had been doing in 2017. The reason is that various groups have ripped and converted to PDF thousands of books. It's trivial to facilitate search on these and other cool stuff at this point. Someone could do it if they really wanted too without too much effort. They haven't most likely because there isn't much profit in it as it stands and legal hurdles since Google failed.
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Re:Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: The Traged...
by jfim on Saturday April 22, 2017 @11:21PM
(#14176287)
The article does mention that one of the big issues Google encountered was logistics.
It's one thing to scan a few dozens/hundreds of books. It's a completely different thing to do it for all books. Assuming you'd want to digitize 100 million books in three years, you'd need to process 91324 books per day, or roughly one book per second, assuming no breaks and 24x7x365 operation.
As the article said, Google poured hundreds of millions of dollars on this, so I'd wager it's not as trivial as it sounds.
Re:Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: The Traged...
by CydeWeys on Saturday April 22, 2017 @11:43PM
(#14176358)
Thank you. This is not "re-create /r/place in a weekend" territory. This is physical hardware development and a substantial logistical challenge.
Re:Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria: The Traged...
by fefesafaea on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @05:54AM
(#14192061)
Found a video of one of their prototype scanners. IIRC they looked at like every scanning solution available and also got a bunch of universities and libraries to help them purchase and operate scanning equipment. Pretty cool stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhL7qJYzcd4
edit: Next vid looks good too. In depth on different scanners.