Like do you know the kind of books the best libraries have? Copies under lock and key, hundreds or thousands of years old, only accessible to be viewed by approved parties and only handled by a curator with white gloves, from bringing it out to turning the pages. If you suggested cutting the spine to scan one of those, they'd slap you back to when it was written!

Create? The internet archive has been using nondestructive book scanners for years, it's nothing new.

It's also nowhere near as fast as just slicing off the spine and dropping the stack on a high speed ADF.

The machine is hungry. "Feed me, Seymour."

This feels uncomfortably like another step in the recapitulation of history.

I believe that most of the rare books being gathered are probably self-published works, which are both rare, and most of those are obscure for good reasons. (The recent growth of self-publish with Kindle changes the ratio somewhat.)

So this is a sorta dumb way to do what they want to do.

(Eg, 0374275637 and 0374533555 are both Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, in hardback and paperback, respectively.) They may also be buying the same book with the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13, 978-0374533557 for the paperback.)