Melville House Books

One thing no one has really discussed in all the furor over Google and its mad scientist plan to copy every book in the world is how, exactly, that copying gets done. It’s Google! It just kind of … happens … right?

No one ever talks about the quality of those scanned pages either. It’s Google! It’ll be a perfectly scanned page, clean as a whistle, right?

Well, no. Turns out elves have to actually take each book in hand, place it on a scanner, scan it, then pick it up, turn the page and do it all over again.

Turns out that system isn’t perfect. Turns out the elves have badly manicured nails that turn up often enough blocking the text.

Also turns out — as this article in The Telegraph reports — that some of the elves wear “finger gloves,” a kind of latex protection that have been dubbed by some wags “finger condoms.”

But this only happens on minor works no one’s going to ever read anyway, right?

Check out Plato‘s The Trial and Death of Socrates.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.