Mildly Interesting

16906 readers

377 users here now

This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

812

At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book—one page at a time, by hand. (files.catbox.moe)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Google have digitised a lot of books using some more advanced tech, though they started out with something a little like this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What happened to that in the end? I heard they wanted to digitize the worlds books and then it just petered out at some point and heard nothing about it. Did they continue or was it spun to Internet Archive to do?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

My understanding is the project led into Google Books. Google fought many legal cases and ultimately won but their enthusiasm to scan more books seems to have waned. Google basically convinced judges that by only letting people see a few pages, it fell under fair use, but then that meant you didn't get a giant library because you couldn't read the whole book.

There's an article about it here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-of-university-library-books

Also see https://www.hathitrust.org/about/ which is mentioned in the article.