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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...
Check out https://www.murfie.com/
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 :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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( ) 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.
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.
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.)
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 :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
printed, sold, shipped to this company, scanned, and then resold
Not resold as physical books, no...since they cut the spine off the book so that they can scan it. Resold as PDF files? Not by this company, anyway...I don't think that business model will work out legally. Resold by shady third parties? Maybe. Copied and bittorrented? Definitely.
I wonder. If the company holds onto the PDF and just sends out that PDF whenever someone mails in a book already scanned, isn't this the equivalent of those music services which simply make you prove through uploading music that you already have a copy and then give you access to their one stored version of that song? I think this has also been done with DVDs as well. So why not books?
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…
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...
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.
It appears that the service returns plain PDF files which are fairly easy to convert into more open formats.