Now anyone who's ever opened a book knows it's next to impossible for a book to lie flat without some sort of device. One solution to the problem was to use glass plates that individually flattened each page, but this method wasn't very efficient. The other solution was to chop off the book's binding, but that method destroyed the book.

It was a problem that vexed book scanners for years until Google came up with this solution

OCR for short

was a tedious process that sometimes resulted in the death of a book