At 10:30 AM 7/24/98 -0700, you wrote:
>This is Just a thought for increasing extropy. If there was a general
>purpose book scanner that was a consumer PC peripheral (<$400) imagine
>how many years earlier we would see the singularity. Lay your book
>face down on on page 1 on the scanner bed, clip the front and back
>cover, go to bed. Expect an explosion of World knowledge available on
>the web - even though mostly illegal. Maybe the big boys are not
>interested in a product that might find itself as an enemy to all the
>worlds publishing companies. The scanner part of this product could
>be bought OEM cheap. The mechanical part could adopt technology from
>document feeders of copy machines. Add a little (err: a lot) software
>to existing OCR routines and wall-a. Wake up to your HTMLized book.
>Hurry up y'all, I got my visa card ready.
Several close friends of mine are interns at Xerox PARC, and they have told
me of a device
they have there which reproduces books in their entirety. One simply places
a book into the machine, and the machine scans and prints every single page
and then binds the pages into a new book. (this is all done at very high
speed btw). The technology is clearly here, all we need to do now is make
it readily available to the public :P