If it seems like we spend so much time here talking about impending robot takeovers, it's precisely because of things like this: a robotic book scanner that could consume the contents of an entire brick-and-mortar library in just one day.

Created by Japan's Ishikawa Oku Laboratory, the BFS-Auto uses high speed, automated page flipping and real-time 3D page recognition to accurately scan books at a rate of over 250 pages per minute. That's about a novel per minute, an Oxford Dictionary in under 10 minutes, or an entire 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica set in roughly two hours.

According to the company, the device's primary innovation is in it ability to flip pages so rapidly while achieving a high-definition resolution of up to 400 pixels per inch, as well as its ability to compensate for the three-dimensional deformation of the paper while the page is being flipped.

The BFS-Auto is set to make its commercial debut some time in 2013, but you can see it in action now in the video below.

Via UK Sun