Some people seeing the Internet Archive bookscanning thread asked about work conditions and had various reactions to it.

There's all sorts of rules on taking photos within work spaces, but this is what the CA book scanning center looked like in roughly 2011; I got permission. https://t.co/Vw4Bb8tVAy

It SOUNDS like a pretty quiet work environment, with the mechanical scanners shifting and people rustling books and papers. Some centers you have headphones to listen to podcasts/music. Some are in colleges, libraries, or office buildings.

Sometimes neat books go by. Often not.

It pays OK. It's a service job but you don't deal with people, you deal with books, which sits well with many folks who work in scanning. I've visited multiple centers over the last decade, in multiple countries and to various levels of announcing I'm visiting. They're solid.

I would normally drop a bunch of photos of the different centers, but I really can't. I know scanners, current and alumni, are following me, they can always chime in.

But it's a specific, occasionally interesting, often dull job in a properly-lit, mostly sitting fashion.