The Secret Of Google's Book Scanning Machine Revealed | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Of Google's Book Scanning Machine Revealed

npr.org

70 pointsneilc7 comments

i actually worked in the special collection division of michigan state universitys library in the spring and summer of 1997. they were using a commercial device, whose name escapes me, that allowed the book to lay flat and be imaged from above. the software accounted for the curvature of the page for ocr purposes. judging from the posted pictures in the article, the google device seems more elaborate with stereo cameras in the infrared spectrum.

bottom line, though, is that people have been digitizing books for a long time before google came along. sure, google is doing it on a larger scale with more resources at their disposal but it is not new to the dozens and hundreds of academic libraries around the world.

a simple search for overhead book scanners returns a ton of links, including this one to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning.

In fact, there's an instructable for making a V-shaped book scanner: http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-...

Just because they wrote a patent application to scan books this way does not mean they actually do it this way.

There is a machine like this in the library at the place where I work. They are commercially available (at a somewhat steep price) and are old hat.

This confirms the ridiculousness of Rainbows End - I'm a huge fan of Vernor Vinge's previous work. He went bad (according to me) after he quit lecturing comp sci to write full-time, in 2000. Larry Niven has said that quitting your job is a mistake for writers, because it dries up your source of raw material (nb: a general observation, not in reference to Vernor Vinge).

I'm sorry, but...what?

The book-scanning process in Rainbows End was an obvious parable, not an attempt at plausible futurism. Even in the book, alternatives to the destructive scanning process existed, and the choice of digitization technique was a business decision, not a technical one.

Furthermore, many of my favorite authors (Stephenson, Pynchon, Murakami) work full-time as writers, and seem pretty capable of doing so without starving for source material.

It's been a while since I read the book, but what's the obvious parable? Maybe for me, it's a victim of an uncanny valley: it's neither stylized nor plausible.

I may not have given it a fair reading, because (personal preference) I really didn't like the book; the cyber stuff seemed more like unoriginal shiny tech than a way to provide insightful commentary on what it is to be human - unlike Tine pack minds, for example.

I haven't done a survey of fulltime writers; and I'm sure exceptions exist as you've noted. Larry Niven knows many more writers than I do, and so I think his observation probably has some merit. But really, I'm just expressing my frustration with Vinge's output, and noting that it coincides precisely with his retirement. I miss his old stuff.

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