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Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End has a massive book-scanning project which consists of dropping books into an industrial shredder and then blowing the shreds through

Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End has a massive book-scanning project which consists of dropping books into an industrial shredder and then blowing the shreds through a long tube lined with cameras. The little fragments of imagery are then stitched together using sufficiently advanced software. This isn't there yet, but I wonder if that's where we're heading...

Natanael_L 11y ago
Too inefficient. Opening up the books and slicing off the pages cleanly would be more effective, and we already have age-old matching techology from bill counters and card sorters.
- david-given 11y ago
  Why do you call it efficient? They were scanning a book every few seconds! While cutting the spines off and running the pages through a sheet feeder requires sustained human interaction for every book.
  - Natanael_L 11y ago
    Not speed-wise. Complexity-wise. And there's a real risk of mismatched pieces. They'd all have to have predictable unqiue shapes otherwise.
    - bazzargh 11y ago
      In the book, one character explains that tearing rather than cutting the books is specifically to get unpredictable unique shapes along the tears, to make matching for reconstruction possible... There will be some loss, true. Even where everything is properly photoed, the programs will make some mismatches. Potentially, the error rate can be less than a few words per million volumes, far better than even hardcopy republishing with manual copyediting. -- Sharif, Rainbow's End p 129 But of course this is fiction. The parallels to what Harvard are doing are obvious, but I don't think anyone would seriously suggest building the Libreanome project in the real world.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    > They were scanning a book every few seconds What's the hurry?
    - bpodgursky 11y ago
      IIRC that was part of the plot too. There was no string reason to prefer this technology, except the company that owned the destructive-scanning IP was pushing their solution before the other ones matured enough to be cost-effective.
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ridgeguy 11y ago
Vinge's book scanning reminded me a lot of DNA shotgun sequencing(1). I wonder if that's what he modeled his method on? (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing

Natanael_L 11y ago

Too inefficient. Opening up the books and slicing off the pages cleanly would be more effective, and we already have age-old matching techology from bill counters and card sorters.

david-given 11y ago
Why do you call it efficient? They were scanning a book every few seconds! While cutting the spines off and running the pages through a sheet feeder requires sustained human interaction for every book.
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  Not speed-wise. Complexity-wise. And there's a real risk of mismatched pieces. They'd all have to have predictable unqiue shapes otherwise.
  - bazzargh 11y ago
    In the book, one character explains that tearing rather than cutting the books is specifically to get unpredictable unique shapes along the tears, to make matching for reconstruction possible... There will be some loss, true. Even where everything is properly photoed, the programs will make some mismatches. Potentially, the error rate can be less than a few words per million volumes, far better than even hardcopy republishing with manual copyediting. -- Sharif, Rainbow's End p 129 But of course this is fiction. The parallels to what Harvard are doing are obvious, but I don't think anyone would seriously suggest building the Libreanome project in the real world.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  > They were scanning a book every few seconds What's the hurry?
  - bpodgursky 11y ago
    IIRC that was part of the plot too. There was no string reason to prefer this technology, except the company that owned the destructive-scanning IP was pushing their solution before the other ones matured enough to be cost-effective.

deleted 11y ago

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ridgeguy 11y ago

Vinge's book scanning reminded me a lot of DNA shotgun sequencing(1). I wonder if that's what he modeled his method on? (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing