• WSJ, Wednesday, November 9, 2005 12:45 PM

The Wall Street Journal today has an interesting article about the meticulous and tedious task of scanning library books for digitization. Scanners literally pluck one book at a time from library shelves, bring them to the six-foot tall, five-foot wide machine, placing the book on a V-shaped tray with two digital cameras looming over the right and left side. Once the picture is taken, the human scanner makes the necessary adjustments and then turns the page. This is part of a huge effort by the Internet Archive to digitize the world's books. The nonprofit has received funds from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Hewlett Packard, and Adobe Systems, as well as several university libraries, to do so. While Google's efforts have come under fire due to potential copyright violations, the Internet Archive's effort, called the Open Content Alliance, is focusing only on books published before 1923, which are no longer under copyright. The process costs nearly 10 cents a page, but more than that, it takes time; in one year, just 2,800 books have been digitized. With Yahoo! and Microsoft recently on board, the effort will likely broaden and speed up.

Read the whole story at WSJ »