book digitising - robots in the library

Many of you are probably already aware of some of the book scanning projects underway around the world. The most well known one is that being run by google. In these projects, books in the collections of the worlds libraries are systematically being scanned and converted into digital assets.

These projects bring up issues connected with intellectual property that can (and do) lead to heated arguments, but I just like this scanning machine, produced by a company called Kirtas, that "rewrite[s] the story of the conversion of books to bytes". It's not the way Google is doing it - apparently they use more human-assisted technologies - but its still pretty amazing. Wait for the embedded movie to load and watch it turn the pages.