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Look into commercial book scanners that use vacuums. This is a solved problem. Kirtas is one of those manufacturers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds63ZBXFdLM http://www.kirtas.com/

50 pages per hour with no damage to the books.

You're looking at $50k-$90k for the equipment plus $8k/year service contract, though. So you need to figure out whether book scanning is something that the Internet Archive is interested in, beyond this project.




I was over there yesterday morning helping sort and it seemed like the vast vast majority of the books were either ring binders or spiral bound and could easily be taken out of the binding to be scanned in a standard scanner.




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