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The Royal Library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC in Egypt, was one of the most famous libraries of ancient times.  The librarians of Alexandria collected hundreds and thousands of books through centuries of conquest.  In AD 641, invaders fed the bound books and papyrus scrolls into the public bath, where a furnace was lit and the books were said to have burnt for six months.

It is the fondest dream of the information age to rebuild this Alexandrian fantasy, containing an archive of all knowledge.  Amazon.com, with currently over 250,000 titles, strived to create this knowledge archive in a unique way.  Taking into consideration the passion inspired by the physical form of books, they chose not to make an e-book project.  Using the book scanner, they first scanned books into their archive.  The 'Search inside a book' feature allows users to search keywords both in book titles as well as deep inside the book contents.  The search returns pictures of pages, and not text. You can find the page, read it on your screen and browse a fixed number of pages.  You cannot copy download or read the entire book. A user cannot view more than a fixed number of pages per month.  Thus the point is just to help the user find a book and not to provide him with a information source.  Once he finds it, he can conveniently purchase the complete physical copy of the book from Amazon, thus increasing the sale of books!

Amazon’s handicap in not being able to create a completely readable digital archive lies in the fact that it deals in commercially viable titles with copyrights spread across countless owners.  There are other ventures like Project Gutenberg that is dedicated to digitizing only public domain titles that are free from copyright.  Having fed over 30,000 titles into the book scanner averaging 50 titles a week, this project is run by the non profit Literary Archive Foundation.

Google Books is another service that combines both Amazon’s approach of limited viewing to copyright bound books and Gutenberg’s approach to public domain books.  Out of the 10 million books that Google has fed into the book scanner, 1 million are full preview based on publisher agreements.  Most of the scanned works are no longer commercially available or are in public domain.

There are plenty of ways to scan a book.  The simplest and least expensive method is destructive scanning, where you cut of the binding of the book converting it to a sheaf of loose papers. The papers are then loaded into an automatic page feeder which feeds it into a book scanner.  This is however not a desirable solution when it comes to old and uncommon books or an expensive collectors’ item.

A non-destructive way of scanning avoids the need to remove the binding of the book. Workers in India, China and Philippines earn around 40 cents an hour to manually turn pages and scan the book using an overhead book scanner.  There are expensive robots, which can do the same at a rate of 1200 pages an hour. 

There are also high end book scanners that employ static charges in air and vacuum to flip pages. A camera, placed over a V shaped cradle, scans the pages automatically.  Images can then be moved from the camera to different editing software where the image can be further processed into archival friendly formats like JPEG or TIFF or web friendly outputs like PDF or JPEG. 

Thus, it seems that it won’t be long before we attain the Alexandrian dream of treasury of all knowledge.