I remember reading about Google's book scanner that operated automatically using vacuum pressure to gently flip pages. I'd love to see an open source variety of that.
I would love if they found a way to offer those books (authors would have to agree) to the world.
If they did, I would forgive them for tracking me all these years.
I'd even put up with ads in the books.
sample: https://books.google.im/books?id=Me8CAAAAQAAJ&printsec=front...
Picture a wedge (shaped like the V of a book lying open on a table) that could move up and down. The wedge would descend and insert itself into the V of the book's pages, then rising up would suck the 2 left and right sheets against the sides of the wedge, scanning as it went.
Then it would blow those 2 pages to the left (or right I forget) and descend again and do the next set.
I thought it was pretty cool. Have never seen something like it since.
If my experience helping to build the diybookscanner.org project taught me anything, it's that picking the low hanging fruit of small efficiency improvements to the (semi-)manual process is so much more effective...