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It's crazy to me, I thought these types of scanners have been really well known for a while now? You can even build your own if you have a silly amount of money to spare for some high quality cameras.

That said, the amount of people who've said a wrong thing about the Internet Archive, and I take the time to engage and say "not true" and then they go "wtf r u" and I tell them and they go "irrelevant" is also more than zero. So, I don't know, stay in school kids

I heard that every book the Internet Archive digitizes is then eaten.

Saw one person said "Well, they SHOULD cut the spines, it's cheaper, just do it to the non-valuable ones." Dude, the Internet Archive has scanned in, quality checked, OCR'd and added 11,000 books. Yesterday. Where do they put the book judge in that process. archive.org/details/inte...

I mean, maybe the Archive could do a better job of just putting trumpets on top of the building to say what a miracle things are. Millions of hand-scanned books. You can click on them right now and start reading most of them. You can select text search and search inside. M I R A C L E S

(I replied something like "Oh, cool, you don't have to do that!")

You are not the only person, and In your case you essentially said the internet archive does something universally abhorrent that strikes at the heart of the 30 year mission goals and intent. I had to find your note to disagree.

They're confusing it with OpenAI/Anthropic/etc, who actually are destroying the books, because of a really dumb copyright loophole futurism.com/artificial-i...

Not a loophole, not even codified in law. In a recent case the judge used it as a point in favor of Anthropic’s fair use defense, so everyone is doing it as a legal CYA. Notably the fair use defense is incredibly subjective, has guidelines a judge can decide to use or not, and makes things really

Where would someone go if they wanted to borrow one of these scanners for, like... A few minutes?

You can mail me at jscott@archive.org if you think you have a situation where the use of one is needed for some unique purpose.

Just an old computer manual I hadn't been able to find elsewhere. Wanting to get it scanned and available, but not wanting to destroy it any more than it has been. Trying to figure out how best to go about it.