I never stop marveling over how far us humans are able to push things, especially technology. I remember when I was a little kid during the ’80s and a friend of mine got a new computer from his dad’s office. It was a moderately powerful PC which of course only hooked up to BBSs through a 1200 baud modem (yes, isn’t it awesome). We used to hack our way through some Pascal to make things happen on the screen only to be able to print it out on his awesome matrix printer. It printed a page in like 4 minutes, and we thought that it was über fast at that time.
Even though these stats don’t exactly feel like they are ancient (well maybe they do), they are still perceived as ancient if you compare it to today’s technology. And, it’s only getting better. Amazon is one of the world’s leading book sellers on the Internet, and they are constantly scanning new books to add to their line up on their website.
So how can they copy those books so fast? It should take forever for someone to type everything into a computer. Of course they use an automated scanner with a side flipper, but, and this is a big but, they don’t have the technology to beat this new and advanced book scanner I am sure.
This will scan a 200 page book in 60 seconds!! It has a camera that enables a framerate of 500fps, and it scans both text and images. It could run through an entire library in a matter of days. That’s what I call technology on steroids!
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