New trend? digitize your books for $1USD each.

[Arbait]

Hello,
I think that the old http://bookscan.us have a better deal?
I mean, is $ 1.00 / Book AND "Up to first 300 pages treated as 1 book (BE). After first 301 pages, every 200 page increment will be treated as one additional book count. Page count includes only main body of text. Front and back matter (preface, index, acknowledgement, index) will be scanned as our courtesy."

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by Arbait

Hello,
I think that the old http://bookscan.us have a better deal?
I mean, is $ 1.00 / Book AND "Up to first 300 pages treated as 1 book (BE). After first 301 pages, every 200 page increment will be treated as one additional book count. Page count includes only main body of text. Front and back matter (preface, index, acknowledgement, index) will be scanned as our courtesy."

Thanks for mentioning that Arbait. That is much more appealing to me than the site where you have to buy an expensive monthly membership. I didn't realize the scans for $1 per book were even still available.

Has anyone here used http://bookscan.us recently?

[anamardoll]

You don't have to buy a membership with 1DollarScan.

[Arbait]

blue_skies, Friday I sent four books - two brand new - white paper, printed clearly, one intermediate and one old, yellowed paper, etc. 270 pgs+460 pgs+180pg+290 pgs = 5 $, paid with PAYPAL.
I'll keep you posted on what happens.

The company is located in Tucson, AZ.
For me it is not an economical solution because of high price of shipping - 24 euros for 2 kg ...

[ab78727]

I sent about 20 books to bookscan.us as well. So far the response time is quite a bit faster than 1dollarscan (I think the latter has just gotten some well-deserved popularity after they lowered the Platinum price in December). Bookscan.us doesn't offer the many options that 1ds has, such as Fine Tuning; I like the latter since the raw color scans are kind of huge (100MB+) so I keep them on the PCs and the ereaders get the fine-tuned files that are much smaller (10MB).

The books I sent Bookscan.us are to be scanned in B&W (per my specification) so hopefully the file size would be reasonable. Once this batch is done and I am happy, I will be sending more just because I am happy with the responsiveness and the status communications. BTW, Bookscan.us will also return the cut-up book back to you for a fee if you want, which is a nice option.

I will continue using both services as long as they perform as expected. I have a whole lot of books to go through and was contemplating buying another 1dollarscan Platinum membership but will try using both vendors for different types of books instead.

[didiee]

Hi First time poster.
For those of you whom have used 1dollarscan. can you explain to me what exactly is fine tune technology? I saw a few samples of the differences, but couldn't find an explanation of it.

Secondly, anyone used scanbook.us gotten the files back?

Thanks so much for your help

[ab78727]

Hi,

Fine Tune is basically a file shrinker. You pick the type of e-reader that you intend to use with the file and it will shrink the file appropriately. For example, I picked Sony Reader and I got back a PDF that was ten times smaller than the original full-color PDF but was of course B&W. If you pick a color tablet, it still shrinks it to about 30% of the original size. For me, this has been a blessing because my books (old school textbooks) end up being 500MB PDF files; seeing that turn into a 50MB+ file is a much better idea for manageability .

I got my first order back from bookscan.us and was very pleased. For small books, his pricing is a bargain and he has a very fast turn around. Customer service is exceptional as well; there was a minor mistake in some of my scans and he took care of the issue right away (I mean right away too - I am still amazed at his awesome response). I sent him a second order already (~30 books) and already have shipment 3 and 4 ready to go .

[ab78727]

BTW, two more things:

- Fine Tune will give you an additional copy of the file, shrunk per your specifications. You get to keep the original file as well.

- Bookscan.us will upload your files to a Dropbox account, which is really cool because you effectively get automatic backup of your files. Also, the scans I got back were really sharp and readable.

I am just thrilled that I know of these two services now. They are both excellent in their own ways and I plan to keep using them both until I deplete my pBook collection (which still has a ways to go).

[didiee]

Thanks ab! For the fast response!

So bookscan.us does not do fine tune, but they can covert to whatever format i need for an extra fee and 1dollarscan dose this for free??
I guess i'm still not 100% sure how the two services are different.

i have one or two books with a lot of excel charts/stat chart... just dont know where to send to.... would probably read on kindle and keep a copy on my iphone...

i know price wise, bookscan wins hands down; however, i'm not sure what advantages would there be if I were to send these books to 1dollarscan.

p.s. i'm indifferent as to if i can get the hard copy back or not.....

thanks again for your time and help.....

[ab78727]

Hi,

I think for 1-2 books, I would be indifferent though I might prefer 1DS because they offer much more options for fine tuning (ipad, sony reader, iphone, nook, etc.). However 1DS would probably cost a bit more (though it looks like fine tuning is now offered for free to non-platinum members). Also, 1DS for non-platinum members will probably take a long while (probably 30 days+) and OCR + book title are extra cost options ($1/set each (set=100 pages)).

For bookscan.us, I think you would pay $4 for each BE (300 pages) and it would include book-title + book-cover-picture + OCR + epub or mobi file (option E at http://bookscan.us/order-page.html). Probably the Mobi/PRC option is best since you can side load it to the Kindle and also upload it to your iPhone for use with the Kindle app on there. So unless you are really short on storage space I would probably go with Bookscan for the low cost and fast turn-around. But if you need to really get the filesize down and can pay a little bit more, 1DS might be the answer. Hope this helps a little bit.

[anamardoll]

Bookscan.us' pdf-to-epub conversion is marked as "no proofreading included"?? MASSIVE WARNING SIGNS. Even ABBYY Fine Reader needs the occasional tweak and it's much easier to do that during conversion than to find it later.

But I love 1DollarScan more than I love most things, so take with a grain of salt.

[Krystl]

Hi all,

first of all--thank you to all the information here. I am ready to take the jump into digitizing my old books that I "need to have just in case" but aren't worthy of "shelf space" (I know, an evil thought ).

A couple of questions after reading through the posts here:

Anamardoll: are you using 1dollarscan's OCR pdfs? Is ABBY capable of just using basic pdfs and "OCRing" them or is the starting point a good OCR? I am assuming that it "crops" the text (removing the margins when saving to HTML) to simplify conversion.

My goal is to determine which company best fits my needs. The finereader program sounds like a good investment if it is ~$100 and i need more than that epubed.

Fine-tuning keeps the pdf format, right, making it exclusive to the selected device? seems to imply that if I have to choose my device making conversion to other devices uncertain.

I'm just too much of a perfectionist. sigh.

[anamardoll]

Krystl, I'm a platinum member, so I am getting the OCR'd PDFs, but I've used both OCR and non-OCR with Fine Reader and I don't think there's a difference -- the program doesn't seem to pull or rely on the OCR data, at least as far as I can tell.

I load PDFs into Fine Reader, eyeball the conversion results (it underlines things it's not sure about), fix the one or two errors, save as an HTML document (which strips off both the margins AND the header/footer stuff that has page numbers and book title repeated each page -- very convenient).

Then I load the HTML document into Sigil. It's all one page at that point, so I go through and do Ctrl+Enter at each chapter break (Sigil keyboard shortcut for breaking everything up). Then I slap in TOC tags for each page, save as epub, and voila!

Takes a little less than an hour for a 30 chapter book. Less time for smaller books.

I think the Fine Reader program is $170, but they have sales from time to time.

http://buy.abbyyusa.com/content/frpro/default.aspx

ETA: If you're just starting out, my advice would be to fill up a flat rate shipping box (cheap shipping = savings) and sent it to 1DollarScan for the no frills conversion -- just PDFs, no OCR, no naming the files, no anything. Just $1 per page. It'll take about 30 days for them to get the files to you, but if you're willing to wait it's a great bargain.

I only joined the Platinum program because I was sending them $100 worth of books ANYWAY so I might as well get the faster service and named files.

[Krystl]

Anamardoll--you are fabulous! thank you for your quick response. You have made this all suddenly "make sense" and simplified the process steps so well, I finally feel like I can "do" this and digitize my work-library efficiently. I can learn new tricks every once in a while but sometimes the steps seem sooo complicated.

(plus gives me ideas for my pdf'd theses, etc.)

I was planning on doing this as you mentioned, but cannot afford a monthy membership for a one-month deal. I can wait for the documents without a problem (do the fine-tuning wherever in the world i roam).

Have you noticed any pages misscanned or missing? seems they charge $2 extra per "book unit) for "insurance" now--keeping everything until you check it which makes it rather spendy if I want to guarantee the scan is complete.

As for ABBY and Sigil, etc. I am waiting for a sale--I have patience (sort of ) and time.

I am just excited to get the (not so valuable) books in storage back where I can use them effectively! My bookshelf-books are a different story, of course.

[ab78727]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

Bookscan.us' pdf-to-epub conversion is marked as "no proofreading included"?? MASSIVE WARNING SIGNS. Even ABBYY Fine Reader needs the occasional tweak and it's much easier to do that during conversion than to find it later.

But I love 1DollarScan more than I love most things, so take with a grain of salt.

Yes, I like 1DS too and will keep my Platinum membership going. But I am now also quite happy with Bookscan.us so I am going to keep both going. Bookscan.us is twice as fast as 1DS Platinum so I hope to reduce my book collection quicker and cheaper than before; I have found the quality of the scans to be sharper than 1DS. I also plan to read the scanned PDFs so the OCR is mostly a nice-to-have for my case.