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I wonder if this would be useful as a dataset for economics research. Lots you could conceivably pull from the ads: fine grained pricing, company formation and destruction, trends in standards for components, performance specs of components over time. All at the time of the Cambrian explosion of computing

Also wow this is a gargantuan effort. I scanned thee equivalent of like one issue of Computer Shopper one time and it was painful. Kudos to the author.

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For any moderately large scale book scanning effort: https://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-sourc...

That prototype "only" damages 70% of the pages.

Really? A comment on the page I linked said:

> The presenter mentions that about 40% of books scanned have some kind of problem, either a folded or a torn page, but they’ve done some work on preventing problems.

Even if every page in 40% of books were damaged, that would only be 40% of pages, not all of them. Although your numbers may be incredibly wrong, your steel-manned assumed thesis is valid: with historical artifacts you can only accept a lower % of damaged pages than human-powered scanning would cause.

I assure you, I hate that thing. It has dogged me and the Internet Archive for over a decade. It is not just vaporware, but dangerous.

It must be a Soviet machine for scanning 40% of the pages then.

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