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

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

#71

Post by squirrel »

icebraining wrote: post #56
squirrel wrote: post #2

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 a…

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

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.

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

#72

Post by xp84 »

jason_slack wrote: post #45
Bud wrote: post #19

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...

me too, I live very close, so I e-mailed them and asked if I could drop off and then pick up when they are complete. I have a lot of programming books that I could love scanned.

> and then pick up

Would you be okay with them no longer being bound? They saw off the binding so they can use them in a sheetfed scanner.

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

#73

Post by xp84 »

sigil wrote: post #23
Bud wrote: post #19

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.

How ridiculous is that?

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

#74

Post by jason_slack »

xp84 wrote: post #72
jason_slack wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

me too, I live very close, so I e-mailed them and asked if I could drop off and then pick up when they are complete. I have a lot of programming books that I could love scanned.

> and then pick up Would you be okay with them no longer being bound? They saw off the binding so they can use them in a sheetfed scanner.

Yeah I was thinking about it and I am happy to part with most of the books as they are programming books.

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

#76

Post by burgerbrain »

wccrawford wrote: post #69
jonnycowboy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#77

Post by CamperBob »

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.

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

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

#78

Post by eru »

algorias wrote: post #42
gwern wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Resold as PDF files? Not by this company, anyway...I don't think that business model will work out legally. 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 t…

Would be interesting to try sending in a book with notes on the margins, see if they get preserved.

If only this service would have been around in Fermat's time.

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

#79

Post by CamperBob »

proee wrote: post #68

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.

Seems a safe bet that scanning equipment and methods will decline in cost faster than the US dollar.

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

#80

Post by eru »

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?

From my experience replacement value plus some extra fixed fee is common. So you might as well just purchase the book. That's cheaper.
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