I want a Machine, into which I can put a book. I would not open the book, just set it on a lit­tle pil­low, and per­haps press a green glow­ing but­ton, or use a lit­tle joy­stick to send it into a big metal tube or some­thing. The lights in the room would be low, and indi­rect; the Machine I Want would be in the mid­dle of a large white expanse of floor. We would be sit­ting at a con­sole, at a dis­tance, not look­ing at the Machine I Want, but rather hunched over the Results Screen.

Expec­tant. Excited. Maybe, I dunno, just a touch concerned.

When the Green But­ton had been pressed or the Small Joy­stick wob­bled appro­pri­ately, rays would come from the heart of the Machine I Want, which would pierce the vol­ume — with­out harm­ing it. Sen­sors would be watch­ing, gath­er­ing ter­abytes of data. A high-​​resolution three-​​dimensional scan (at least 600³ vox­els per cubic inch) would be cre­ated by the Machine I Want’s onboard con­trollers. Oh, regard­ing the rays: if you pre­fer, mag­nets might be involved. That would be good, because there would also be large sweat­ing tanks of liqui­fied gas in the room. This is a mere detail; I would be happy to wait in the next room, gaz­ing expec­tantly down at the con­sole, while your choice of pow­er­ful ener­gies were brought to bear.

Go ahead. Try a few.

Now, before the expec­tant read­ers were shown much on the Results Screen, the result­ing inter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the high-​​resolution 3-​​D scan of the book would first be sent to a mod­er­ately pow­er­ful com­puter in the Machine I Want. Or next to it. There, the pages of the text would be dis­cerned, the char­ac­ters and illus­tra­tions saved, and OCR^†ed.

In the end, a valu­able antique book would not have been busted open like road kill on a hot sum­mer day, just so every page can be apposed to the over-​​small platen of a flatbed scan­ner. Brit­tle or uncut pages would not be dam­aged. Bind­ings would remain intact. That would be nicer than what we have now — which I admit is far nicer than what we had before that.… No, what we have now is an amaz­ing and excel­lent piece of hard­ware, and I expect we will use it hap­pily until I wear it to a lit­tle scanny nub.

But see, it’s not the Machine I Want.

So, any­way… I’m waiting.

Any­body?

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^†One piece of actual tech­ni­cal util­ity to this post: I find myself won­der­ing if OCR in three dimen­sions is eas­ier or harder than OCR in two dimen­sions. I can see argu­ments for both answers.…