This was one of the big fears. That countries that had far more people than the western world would end up trying to chase that middle class lifestyle. And yet here we are.
I suspect we are going to be like the aphids on a rosebush that will suck it dry just trying to live and most of us go with it.
If we were to live closer to what many philosophers and religions of modesty, we probably would have never gone down this path. Yes, we wouldn't have most of the great stuff we have today but we also wouldn't be looking at a system that can lurch over and crash. There is no winning move in the universe just dances and responses.
Although they may increase this year because the Chinese government has been encouraging the substitution of coal for gas & oil during the Iran crisis.
Getting 10 million people to do anything is really, really hard. Getting 10 million people to spend hours scanning a book (which takes a really long time with a home scanner) sounds impossible :(
Not everyone should scan stuff. If you spend any serious time looking through stuff that randos on the Internet have scanned the quality fits the Bell Curve perfectly.
Biggest problems:
- scanning items that are bigger than the scanner platten so the start/end of every line is cut off.
- becoming an "editor": scanning only the pages you think are interesting and skipping intros, forewords, title pages, copyright pages etc
I work in this space. I now require that before scanning a video is made carefully flicking through every page of the item so it can be checked after scanning to ensure all the pages are present and in the original order.
Even the big libraries fuck up. I wanted an intact copy of Harper's Weekly from 1900 that has a big fold-out map in it. It's not clear to the libraries scanning this issue that the map is missing from their copies. None of the copies for sale from dealers have the map. Even when it is still glued into the middle it gets missed by industrial scanners. Google's scan only includes the (blank) back of the folded map.
Luckily GPT was able to track down a copy in a university special collections and fired off an email asking them to scan it. I just got the scan today:
I spend a lot of tokens getting LLMs vision tools to find the missing pages in vintage items and then try to reassemble them from other scans where available.
I'm also splitting up volumes to reupload. A lot of periodicals are only available online as giant multi-gig volume PDFs with all the issues in one file. I have a separate app I wrote to scan all the pages looking for covers so they can be split into PDFs and then identifying the volume/issue/month/year data from the cover or title page.
In the context of books, "scanning" is now more commonly something that should be called "camming" --- you simply point a camera at the book, and take a picture of every page.
The ruling did not say that. This has been widely misreported. The books are destroyed because it's much easier and faster to cut off the spine and use a sheet fed scanner. Non destructive scanners are much slower.
I'm not sure how I feel about this wave of US protectionism, but if it continues for long it is becoming a massive opportunity for anyone who can start a manufacturing company.
