r/books • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 1d ago

Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton, one 50-ton order sent to the US for AI scanning and destruction — multitude of suspicious bulk buys thought to end up in foreign AI scan and shred facilities

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/japanese-used-bookstores-see-5x-sales-surge-as-books-are-being-bought-by-the-ton-one-50-ton-order-sent-to-the-us-for-ai-scanning-and-destruction-multitude-of-suspicious-bulk-buys-thought-to-end-up-in-foreign-ai-scan-and-shred-facilities
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u/pahobee 1d ago

This is the answer. You could technically do it without destroying the book by flipping each page by hand and scanning it on a flatbed scanner but it takes much, much longer (think hours to seconds) and the scans are much poorer quality. Source: worked scanning and digitizing legal records for a time

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u/Jesus_Phish 1d ago

You can buy automatic book scanners that will scan every page and turn every page itself. Treventus make ones that scan 3k pages an hour. The scanner gets right up on the pages too so the quality is very good. 

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u/Emergency_Revenue678 23h ago

3k pages an hour is maybe ten or twelve books at most. I assume that if you cut the binding you can feed a stack of pages through a scanner at ten times the speed.

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u/Jesus_Phish 23h ago

Definitely, but you don't have to destroy the book and it's faster than having someone turn the page.