> I challenge you to pick a random piece of paper, put it on the kitchen table, take a shot with your phone, and look at the result. Tell me it's not easily rea

> I challenge you to pick a random piece of paper, put it on the kitchen table, take a shot with your phone, and look at the result. Tell me it's not easily readable. That's a straw man. I never claimed that you can't take a readable photograph of a document with a phone. The gist of my point is your idea seems to be mainly about insurance against catastrophic destruction (which happens, but infrequently). You're very focused on basic usability of the output of your proposed project, but you don't address 1) if your digitization will survive long enough to do its job as insurance, 2) damage that your project could cause (e.g. poorly paid workers being careless and damaging or disorganizing things irreparably). I've read a very little bit about archival science, but one of the basic things they emphasize is preserving the original organization, because important information can be encoded in it. That could get easily get lost by minimum wage workers spilling documents on the floor, or rearranging things to make their job easier (e.g. when I used to scan receipts, I'd order them by width and rough length, because that would cause the fewest issues with the document feeder). Then you have issues with old fragile documents, accidentally tearing things out of binders, etc.)