They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content?
Or just get people to upload photos from the backs of the books in their library. Then extract from those the titles. Match them up against books that are missing in the digital library and are being requested by users.
Then send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book.
Give an incentive based on both the number of requests and the speed of uploading the scan.
Could even allow requesters to set their own rewards. “I’d be willing to pay X to get this book scanned before Tuesday”.
> send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book.
Scanning books take a lot of time. And making an actual high quality scan of a book is difficult even if you have a good scanner.
Physically sharing books could make it so that important books eventually get it into the hands of people with the right expertise and equipment to efficiently produce stellar quality digital scans of the book.
You can scan a 500 page book in 20 minutes with you phone, non-destructively. Though it’s not fun and the quality will not be ideal, especially if there are graphics in the text also. For text-only books, quality matters little as long as the OCR can read the text.
I think that's ambitious. I've scanned a handful of books and although I don't know the page count, it's always been multi hour projects. Especially the editing afterwards to mark the text on the page and adjust warp tend to be time consuming. I even had a mounted tripod and remote to standardise.
vFlat Scan [0] automates the unwarping.