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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.
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 :(
OTOH, it does make it fairly attractive for 5 or 10 or 20 students to buy one copy and have it scanned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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".
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?
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( ) where there were supposed to be things inside the parenthesis. I checkout…
Because of that, I needed to convert a DjView file to PDF a few times. The thing is, I have yet to find a good djvu2pdf converter -- they create PDF files with ridiculous sizes, like 100 or even 500 MB and they are terribly slow. I got better results in terms of size when I tried printing from djvu viewer with PDF printer, and while the file size was good (10-40 MB) and quality was acceptable most of the time (depending on the initial quality of djvu), it was so goddamn slow and resource intensive that I stopped doing it altogether and went back to dead tree books -- converting ~400 pages djvu this way took about 3-4 hours on 2 years old laptop.
Also, my Kindle was really, really slow showing them -- turning pages took about 10 seconds. Everything else was fine, though -- math books aren't really meant to be read fast, so this was not a big problem.
Anyway, anybody knows a better way of doing that?
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...
Yet, the address is of a parking lot... (10 E 3rd Street in San Jose). Strange.
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.
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.)
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...
Re 1), what's odd is that current ebook pricing makes this an attractive option.