Pointer to article:
The most durable, eye-friendly copy is history’s ultimate transmission medium. Hardcopy is the only format that will survive the never-ending softcopy format wars. Copying from one hardcopy format to others (hopefully, as many as possible) is the best way to ensure that information survives the many conflagrations, inundations, and infestations that will efface today as readily as they’ve blotted out our past. Any innovation that allows more information to jump the erasure gap is on the side of the angels. That’s why I raise a glass in toast to these Xerox researchers. Let’s make every photocopier smart enough to interpolate and reconstruct the hard-to-scan words on adjoining pages at the common book bind. Net-net, the bind/spine of the book is our friend, after all—it holds together large clumps of information in their intended sequence. This innovation—smarter word-image capture from angled/bend pages—lets us have the best of both worlds: preserving the book’s spine while ensuring fuller transmission of the book’s contents.