
Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email - ph0rque
http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/18/company-scans-your-books-for-a-dollar-ship-em-in-get-a-pdf-via-email/
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caryme
My grandmother, who passed away last week, was an author. She self-published
two novels through a printer who typeset her books and printed a few hundred
copies. I don't know what happened to the original text files she gave her
printer and I know she never got a digital typeset copy.

I've been wanting to re-release her novels as ebooks, but haven't had a way to
digitize them. This is perfect for me.

~~~
davidw
Ideally you'd get something besides a PDF, which is a pain in the neck to turn
into a 'real' eBook.

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CamperBob
Why is that? .PDF isn't proprietary enough?

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davidw
PDF is really a display format, whereas epub/mobi are more HTMLish in that
they are not quite so specific in how they want things displayed, and thus can
be flowed into different screen sizes pretty easily.

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tzs
I wonder how well they do with math books?

Even the original publishers have trouble with those. I was going to buy the
ebook version of "Proofs from the Book", but downloaded the sample first from
Amazon, and it was completely worthless. You'd have a line that would say
something like (S in the following represents a capital Greek Sigma):

    
    
       S( ) <= S( )
    

where there were supposed to be things inside the parenthesis.

I checkout out a few other serious math books for Kindle, and although most
weren't as bad as the above, I'd usually find some deal breaking errors in the
handling of math symbols. For instance, I seem to recall one that would lose
exponents of -1 if they were attached to a small letter. I didn't see anything
else wrong...but it was an abstract algebra book, and it is customary to use
multiplicative notation for groups, an so a^-1 is the customary notation for
the inverse of a. Group theory gets very confusing when a^-1 gets replaced by
a.

At this point, I don't think I'd buy a math book for Kindle even if the
preview was flawless unless I was very sure that the preview included every
mathematical symbol that would be used in the book, and in all the sizes they
would be used in.

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mikeknoop
If it's a raw image with little to no OCR, you won't have that problem.

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Bud
What I noticed about this company, after checking their website:

1) They list an "Accept direct shipment from Amazon" option (coming soon).
Think about it: this means a book could be printed, sold, shipped to this
company, scanned and destroyed without ever being read. Something is very odd
here.

2) The business is located four blocks from my apartment. Maybe I'll try them
out...

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sigil
Re 1), what's odd is that current ebook pricing makes this an attractive
option.

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sebastianavina
I can imagine a group of 20 students, buying a book, shipping directly from
amazon to that company, and getting a copy for a very small fraction of the
cost

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esrauch
While that's true, the post you are replying to was basically saying "I can
imagine a single person buying a book, shipping directly from amazon to that
company, and getting a copy for less than the ebook cost" which I think is a
more extreme version of your scenario.

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squirrel
Article doesn't mention a big audience that would be very interested in cheap
book scanning: the print disabled. Blind and partially-sighted people are the
most obvious members of this group but dyslexics and others who cannot read
normal print would also benefit. Many books are of course already available
through libraries for the blind but if you need less-popular or specialised
texts you are out of luck.

With an aging population it seems this is a very natural niche.

Now if it were only OnePoundScan instead of OneDollarScan...

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icebraining
This doesn't OCR them, it's just an image, so the blind are still out of luck.

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squirrel
Well, it still helps - you can OCR a book file yourself, even if you can't
see; just a few clicks and then go do something more interesting. Scanning
your own book is possible, but requires sitting there throughout.

Edit: <http://1dollarscan.com/pricing.php> says "OCR stands for Optical
Character Recognition. The PDFs will contain the OCR text layer behind the
images to make the text searchable and selectable." This service is labelled
free so I guess you get it (or can get it) for each scan.

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iqster
The video indicated that the binding for the book was being cut off. I suspect
that will prevent students from borrowing books from the library, getting them
scanned via this service, and returning them.

It is sad that many hundreds of thousands of hours have been wasted by
students photocopying books :(

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pavel_lishin
> I suspect that will prevent students from borrowing books from the library,
> getting them scanned via this service, and returning them.

Now I'm curious, how much does a library charge for a lost book?

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dman
Dont go down that road - please. If you "borrow" someones book you rob one
person of the privilege of reading it in the future. If you pull the same
stunt with a library book you potentially rob many people well into the
future. For some reason libraries are very slow to replace lost books. I guess
just knowing with good certainty that the book is actually gone for good
rather than placed in the wrong section would be a tough nut to crack.

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pavel_lishin
I wouldn't. But it's not like I'm the only person who would think of this. So,
really - are lost book fines low enough to incentivize students to steal them,
ship them to get scanned, and pay the fine?

Especially in the case of required textbooks.

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billswift
The normal fee is the cost of the replacement and a processing fee (University
of Maryland and most of the public libraries I have dealt with). When I was at
the university they would accept a replacement that you bought, but still
charge the processing fee to get it back on the shelf.

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matdwyer
I run a photo scanning company in Canada (<http://photoscanning.ca>) and I was
seriously surprised at the number of people asking for this service. I get a
ton of teachers that are looking to have their material on their laptop
instead of lugging everything around, students wanting their texts on their
iPads, etc. We haven't officially done it yet as I hadn't looked into the
copyright issue as much as I should, but may in the future.

The digital photography method is certainly less destructive, but hugely more
expensive & time consuming. A $15,000 scanner can do 120+ sheets per minute...
The pricing for book pages seems very solid (keep in mind that scanning is
quoted in impressions, so your 100 sheets is 50 pages double sided, if I'm not
mistaken)

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mp3jeep01
The way the current rules are written for fair-use, if two people send in an
identical book, are they allowed to send the same PDF to both rather than
scanning twice? I wonder how the governing bodies would view that. Side-note,
I think it'd be interesting if if they collected/published data about what
books are sent in, and from where.

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dctoedt
> _if two people send in an identical book, are they allowed to send the same
> PDF to both rather than scanning twice?_

In somewhat-analogous circumstances almost 30 years ago, a court said "no."
The case was _Micro-Sparc, Inc. v. Amtype Corp._ , 592 F.Supp. 33, 34-35, 223
USPQ (BNA) 1210 (D. Mass. 1984). The defendant offered a keyboarding service:
It typed in the source code of programs published in a hobbyist magazine, then
sold disks to purchasers of the magazine. The court rejected a fair-use
defense and held that this infringed the copyright in the programs. (Adapted
from a chapter in a treatise I published long ago.)

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pontifier
After reading this case, it seems to me that a different section of the
copyright code was tested here. I believe space shifting of media other than
computer programs has a solid history...

That the subject was a computer program is what seemed to trip up the case in
my opinion.

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tricky
I want to do this with all my books and paperwork (old bills, receipts, notes
from college, photographs (crappy snapshots, really)). This was my plan:

Buy a ScanSnap s1500m for $420. It does double sided scans at 20 ppm but that
doesn't include OCR time or paper jams. Let's guess it averages 500 pages an
hour.

Pay a neighbor kid $10 an hour to cut and scan.

Even if I sold the scanner when I was done, this is still way cheaper. It's a
shame they don't scan things besides books. Although, I'm not sure I want to
send my old tax forms to a sweatshop...

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tapp
> It's a shame they don't scan things besides books

It sounds like they do. Homepage says books/photos/business
cards/documents/greeting cards.

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yariang
This is a cool idea but it is a bit sad that it is necessary. Sad because it
is wasteful. Books are written in a digital format. So we are using natural
resources to make them, turning them into digital (which they already were,
and probably in a better format then PDF like LaTeX, specially for technical
books), and then destroying the physical copies after they consumed resources.

Of course it's necessary because not all publishers release digital versions
or they release it with a ton of DRM, etc..

Still, it's a bit sad.

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wmf
A lot of us are doing the same thing with CDs and DVDs. You can choose waste
or DRM; so far you can't have neither.

~~~
RexRollman
Most music available for purchase these days doesn't have DRM but in the case
of video, you are correct.

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signa11
Would something similar make sense for say music cd's, dvd's etc? I for one
would _love_ to send someone my media collection, and have it ripped into
lossless format and put on cloud. In order to get around piracy issues etc
maybe the entire collection can be digitally signed by my public key...

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jasongullickson
Check out <https://www.murfie.com/>

~~~
nooneelse
Hmm, now what about that box of tapes and mix-tapes I have in storage?

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mc32
This is a repeat article of a business borne in Japan fueled by iPads and lack
in home shelf-space in big cities.
[http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/japanese-book-
scannin...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/japanese-book-scanning-
services-fueled-by-ipad-e-readers/)

I think they scan new books, once they have one scan in inventory, they don't
have to scan it again. When you send them your book, it's proof you owned one
and they send you a PDF. That is, they don't scan all individual books --so if
yours had margin notes, that would be lost, I believe.

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int3rnaut
Book scanning is actually a great tool for University students. I know that a
lot of the actual University libraries are trying to go digital, but in the
mean time being able to quickly find specific passages by utilizing the find
function makes for a much easier day at the old study hall. This sort of idea
could certainly pick up traction around schools for the next few years.

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wccrawford
I was all there, until it said 'PDF'. For my purposes I need a more accessible
format.

Other than that, I could definitely see this helping with my foreign language
studies. Especially Japanese, as the company appears to do a lot of books in
that language.

~~~
jonnycowboy
What kind of format were you looking for? Would it be better to receive it in
all three: PDF (w/ OCR performed), TIFF, and ASCII?

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wccrawford
UTF8 preferred, since I'd be doing mostly Japanese. Shift-JIS would be
acceptable. Basically just plain text. For books, anyhow. If I sent any
comics, I'd want image files.

Though, after thinking about the cost of shipping, book, etc, I'm not sure I'd
send much... It'd be only things that I really, really want to read and just
haven't learned the vocab for yet. And there really isn't much of that.

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burgerbrain
They OCR it, so with the PDF you get whatever text data they are able to
extract from it (don't know about the encoding, but that is easy to convert),
_plus_ additional information.

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proee
They chose a pretty bad name for their website.

What happens when they need to charge more (or less) than one dollar? Also,
they're also locking themselves into the "scanning" market with the word
'scan' in their domain name.

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gwern
> What happens when they need to charge more (or less) than one dollar?

Why would they need to charge more? And the nice thing about computer tech is
that with dropping costs, you don't have to change the price, just the
quantity each $1 buys you...

(Right now $1 only buys you 100 pages, which is an awful small book.)

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jonnycowboy
This would be a great business if you got to keep your book. Ie: instead of
1$, pay 5$ for the first 100 sheets but no spine-cutting and you get the book
back intact after. Much more worth it!

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TechnoFou
They should have a student plan. I see this being very useful for college and
university students like me. Your one tablet could contain all of your books
and manual!

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klinquist
Do they OCR before converting to PDF? Having a PDF that is just a 'picture'
isn't very helpful (can't search for text, change text size, etc).

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markprice
yes, the pricing page on their site says OCR is included free.

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pyre
That depends though. Isn't there a way for the PDF page to be an image, but
for OCR to produce an index of keywords, so that you are viewing the image,
but the index is searchable? This doesn't solve the increase/decrease text
size issue (though it does solve the searching issue).

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wmf
Yes, searchable PDF puts the OCRed text behind the image so that it's not
visible but is still searchable.

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stevenp
Wow, maybe we'll finally get a digital edition of "The Four Steps to the
Epiphany".

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kwamenum86
They're not scanning your books for a dollar. They're letting you pay them to
give them books. Then they resell them at some discount. Speculation...but
that's what I would do.

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hector031
The 1DollarScan site says they cut the spines off the books to scan them, so
unless that isn't accurate, they aren't reselling the books.

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nooneelse
If they get the same book to scan twice, why actually do the second scan? Why
not just use the scan from the first copy of the book? And if that is the
case, now they have a fresh copy of the book with its spine intact.

It would be a waste of the resources invested in the production of that
physical book to not find some productive use for that copy.

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ThePawnBreak
Some people write notes on the margins of the page and underline key-phrases
when reading. I don't think they would check each book to see if it was
"clean".

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eru
How about you just let the customer indicate whether he has a clean book or
not? Just charge more for `dirty' books.

