reality check
A
Kirtas type scanner will do 1200 pages per hour straight flipping. If you ran one 24/7 (never stopping to change books) you could do a million books printed between 1918 and 1923 (average page count 300) in about 30 years or if you had ten scanners at work 3 years. In three years another million books would be copyright accessible. Every subsequent three year period the million book increment will prove less adequate. To sustain the project a different technology scanning the closed book will be needed. But raw capture time does not include image processing or reformatting for the web. And so onÖ
Anyway, even if we are talking about the speed of light and all print is suddenly simulated on-line, there are still other thresholds to consider. These are constraints of bionic eye reading, ergonomics of comprehension and retention and haptics of specific reading formats. I am not convinced that the codex mechanism, refined across cultures for over two millennia, can suddenly be superceded by screen based presentation, That is something like imagining cars superceded by the airplane.
institutional digital repository
Clifford Lynch provided another Iowa big heads
power conference on the latest Google immunization for libraries. They must grab back their content since they have already lost proprietary access services.