According to Wikipedia, Google is using a camera that is capable of scanning Google Books (the company's online digitized collection) at an alarming rate of 1,000 pages per hour.

While that sounds like quite a healthy pace, it's got nothing on the scanning device a very skilled team at the University of Tokyo have managed to put together; said to be capable of scanning a 1,000 page book in just four minutes!

The core component of the device is a high-speed camera that can make 500 shots in a single second and is based on infrared laser technology. Users are required to manually flip the pages under the camera, which then makes shots of the print material. The device is able to scan everything that's printed on paper, from character written in latin or other languages to graphs or photos.