check it out...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/book-flipping-...

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.

no, it's not actually here yet, but this isn't just a pile of david rothman bullshit hype, this has some reality to it. -bowerbird