Quote:
Originally Posted by binaryhermit
EDIT: I assume for ebooks of sufficiently old print editions (AKA old enough there's not a text file of the book from the production process) they do more or less exactly what Quoth described
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Pirates for ARC and new releases, because the crazy big publishers do paper first. The publishers do it for their old releases, even sometimes to be able to reprint paper. They don't want to print a facsimile and won't have the original plates.
You can now buy a camera based scanner cheap enough on Amazon that has lasers for page curl and automatically capture an entire book the way Google does it. Their auto scan & page turner is pretty fast. So they can digitise rare/library books. They often don't proof the OCR if it seems OK for search. See Google Books (not the one on the Playstore).