[knodi123]

I worked for a company that did this. We chopped off the spines to turn them into looseleaf, which could be rapidly scanned in an automated fashion. Then disposed of the original materials and mailed our clients CD-ROMs of high-res scans, optionally OCRed. Obviously there are downsides to this approach, but for situations where fits, it makes a ton of sense.

Please don't take this sentence out of context, but I kept a lot of severed spines as souvenirs when I left that job.

[Kaibeezy]

Semi-related: Law students often [used to in the early 90s / may still] get the spines sliced off heavy casebooks and the innards punched for 3-ring binders. Carry around only the pages you’ll need.

It was extravagant and fussy, but super handy for a bike commute. Scanning the loose pages would have been OK if that tech had been more friendly. 1000 pages, thin, flimsy paper and tiny print might still be a challenge. No tablets in those days.

[Cyph0n]

> I kept a lot of severed spines as souvenirs when I left that job

Brutal.

[contingencies]

Would be a fantastic way to outfit a bar or lounge. Severed spines with an e-interface for content access. Maybe some kinda laser pointer based lookup.

[jacquesm]

Suddenly those fake bookshelves that people buy to look as if they're well read make perfect sense. Have to re-calibrate.

[DonHopkins]

Speaking of spines and copyright issues:

In K W Jeter's excellent dark cyberpunk novel "Noir", intellectual property theft is viewed as literally killing people by removing their livelihood, so copyright violators were punished by having their still-living spinal cords stripped out and made into high quality speaker cords in which their consciousness is preserved, usually presented to the copyright owner as a trophy.

"In the cables lacing up Alex Turbiner's stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who'd thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him."

https://marzaat.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/noir/

>There’s a lot to like in the novel.

>My favorite section is the middle section where the origin of the asp-heads is detailed via McNihil’s pursuit of a small time book pirate and the preparation of the resulting trophy. The information economy did, in this future, largely come to place. As a result, intellectual property theft is viewed as literally killing people by removing their livelihood. Therefore, death is a fitting punishment. McNihil, in his point by point review of the origin of asp-heads, notes that even in the 20th Century there was the phrase: “There’s a hardware solution to intellectual property theft. It’s called a .357 magnum.”

>Actually it’s decided that death is too good and too quick for pirates.

>Their consciousness is preserved by having their neural network incorporated in various devices. (Turbiner likes to use stripped down spinal cords for speaker wire.)

>This sounds like a cyberpunk notion but, in other parts of the novel, Jeter takes a swipe at such hacker/information economy/internet cliches as information wanting to be free (McNihil destroys a nest of such net hippies) or the future economy being based on information. Villain Harrisch sneers at the notion stating that information can be distorted but atoms – and the wealth they represent – endure.

>Still, his novel is chock full of the high-tech, low-life that characterizes cyberpunk.

(I'd quote some more, but as a high-tech, low-life net hippie, I'm afraid of having my nest destroyed and getting my spine ripped out!)

[jacquesm]

I suspect the writer to be showing a bit of his bias here. Wonder what his stance was on librarians, death by being buried under books perhaps?

[DonHopkins]

K W Jetter was a good friend of Philip K Dick, and the character Alex Turbiner had some similarities and might have been based on him! From the review I linked to:

>A sort of Dick-like (in the sense of a largely ignored and prolific author of paperbacks and lover of music) author and idol of McNihil shows up in Turbiner. (Jeter wryly notes that authors were particularly “mean bastards” in regard to copyrights.)

It's ironic and fitting that PKD has been reincarnated as a robot and new versions of his mind and his work have been reconstructed by infringing on his intellectual property rights with machine learning.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/sep/14/copyright...

https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11787262/blade-runner-neural-ne...

K W Jeter also wrote some authorized sequels to Blade Runner (the movie, not the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter