A good look at the Million Book Project out of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. Includes the concern of computer scientist Raj Reddy that Google Book Search will be “a captive solution for all the libraries.” He’s still enthusiastic about the potential of the Google project to complement his own work. Excerpt from the MIT Technology Review:
In the CMU project, though, the scanning technology is off the shelf. They’re using readily available Minolta PS 7000 book scanners set up at 40 scanning stations in India and China, where the local governments are helping to keep the costs low for the nonprofit project. In this setup, workers manually turn each page. Seven years into the project, around 600,000 books (mostly public-domain works shipped from around the world) have been scanned, and every day another 100,000 pages join the digital corpus. At this rate, it could take just under five years to complete the CMS project.
(Found via BobR at MobileRead. Also see a Stanford-related article and a TeleBlog post on scannng gizmos.)
