Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

singularityhub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 99 posts

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#61

Post by caryme »

davidw wrote: post #53
caryme wrote: post #9

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.

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

I'll probably OCR the PDF and see where I can go from there. It's a big jump start that I couldn't have easily done on my own.

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#62

Post by ScottBurson »

caryme wrote: post #61
davidw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll probably OCR the PDF and see where I can go from there. It's a big jump start that I couldn't have easily done on my own.

The 1DollarScan website says they do the OCR for you. They also claim that the result is searchable, which of course it couldn't be if they didn't OCR it.

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#63

Post by billswift »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #21
dman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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.

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.

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#64

Post by jahmed »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
iqster wrote: post #7

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 :(

> 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?

At the university library I work at its minimum $65 replacement charge depending on the actual replacement cost plus a $15 processing fee.

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#65

Post by mgkimsal »

yariang wrote: post #55

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 no…

There's generations of books that were printed before the original book was in anything but analog form.

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#66

Post by caryme »

ScottBurson wrote: post #62
caryme wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll probably OCR the PDF and see where I can go from there. It's a big jump start that I couldn't have easily done on my own.

The 1DollarScan website says they do the OCR for you. They also claim that the result is searchable, which of course it couldn't be if they didn't OCR it.

I may still want to OCR it myself for more control over the process (particularly in identifying and correcting OCR errors). In my experience, there's a difference in expectation of quality between OCR to make a PDF searchable and OCR to generate a standalone text file.

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#67

Post by wmf »

pyre wrote: post #54
markprice wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

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

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#69

Post by wccrawford »

jonnycowboy wrote: post #46
wccrawford wrote: post #8

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.

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?

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.

Re: Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email

#70

Post by RexRollman »

wmf wrote: post #59
yariang wrote: post #55

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 no…

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.

Most music available for purchase these days doesn't have DRM but in the case of video, you are correct.
Post reply on HN