...And how do they do it, really?

One of our readers sent us a link to a book-scanning machine which claims to do 2400 pages per hour. Too bad we can't pull their animated .gif in here, but it's worth taking a look at.

This is probably NOT how Google is doing it—their technology is a proprietary secret— nor necessarily any of the other big scanning projects. But it does appear that the days of dissassembling (that is, destroying) a book in order to preserve its content may be past.