I worked for the Harvard library for a while (as a part time student job) examining the quality of a lot of these Google scans in ~2005. I’m frankly not very i

I worked for the Harvard library for a while (as a part time student job) examining the quality of a lot of these Google scans in ~2005. I’m frankly not very impressed by Google’s scanning process, OCR, image detection, de-warping, contrast adjustment, general QA/QC, etc. Quality is variable, peak quality is mediocre, and the results are largely useless for anything but text. Like a lot of other parts of Google, it’s a case where they tried to cheap out on trained human labor, and make it up with algorithms. On the upside, even a mediocre book scan is better than nothing.