10 Secs of CAPTCHA Code = Digitize books !

In many websites today , we fill in what is called CAPTCHA codes.
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. These are primarily codes used to distinguish humans from spamming programs which can automatically submit spam contents. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can't:

CAPTCHA codes are used now almost in all websites which has large number of users posting contents.
But there are more interesting things to it...
The team behind CAPTCHA code  have now taken  this concept to a new level -As part of a larger initiative where old books are getting digitized ,CAPTCHA codes are used creatively. Certain words which cannot be read accurately by computers during digitization  are collected and put down as CAPTCHA codes.( Generally , Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is used to digitize books). The same word is given to many users and based on the number of similar results the 'word' gets digitized.
So every time you break your head to read and type the CAPTCHA code you are helping to digitize books.

A wonderful initiative which demonstrates how collective power of humans can help to drive excellent outcomes !
Check out this TED TALK