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

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwjone1

Seems like giving copies of the book to third parties without the permission of the copyright holder would be the definition of what a library does, normally. Library has copies it has purchased, it loans them to library members. These would still be purchased (or donated) books, legitimately owned by the library, there's no additional number of copies being created or loaned.

Copyright law isn't involved when a library loans someone a copy of a paper book, because no additional copies of the book are being created. When a library loans an eBook, additional copies are, by definition, involved, which is why copyrighted eBooks can only be lent with the specific permission of the copyright holder - those who have signed up with Overdrive (or whatever other library provider is being used.)

[goldilocks]

I noticed in the picture examples of "Fine Tune" it says: Scanner Setting: ScanSnap S1500.

I got a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (wonder if it is the same!) auto-feed scanner for my b-day last year. I have scanned over 100 pbooks. It will save as pdf, searchable pdf, word, excel, send to email.... It also has several settings for color, b&w, gray... I don't see any kind of "Fine Tune" though. It came with AbbyFineReader (may only be used with ScanSnap) and it also came with Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard.

I have no problem "ripping" a book apart and scanning while doing other things. It does take time proofreading and fixing.

I guess I might consider this service if I had some hardcover books I wanted scanned.
Also they only hold the books for 2 weeks after scanning (even though the file is available for 30 days). I may not get the time to review it before it gets recycled.

So right now I cannot justify spending $1 to scan 200 pages (plus shipping costs), but this has been an interesting thread!

Karen

[Pinecone]

Heck, if that is all one needs, I may have to buy one.

[Fluribus]

Originally Posted by blue_skies

I don't know much about coding, but it looks like it's putting everything into cells.

Maybe I'll give RTF another try. When I first got the scanner, I tried saving in RTF, but that saved really weird too. And I use open office and even though OO is default on my computer for opening .doc files, when I tried to save to .doc, it kept opening my Microsoft office trial.

It does look like its putting everything into tables or text boxes.

Have you tried opening the html files in Open Office. I haven't used it in a long time, but Word has an option to drop text out of boxes. OO may have a similar function or some other way to strip that formatting out.

If that fails, you could save the file to rtf. Open that in OO. If no lines show up save as html. Then import that into Sigil.

Of course, by now you've probably given up the rat race and moved to a beach in Tahiti.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by vxf

CUT MY BOOKS? Are they f@&%ing kidding me?

better than burning them, no?

[computer-girl]

Originally Posted by ab78727

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.

Assuming that you did NOT pay the additional $2 per set for High Compression, have you used Adobe Acrobat to compress any files pdf from 1DollarScan and save them to another PDF file?

If so can you give the original PDF file size vs. the compressed PDF file size with Acrobat?

If you have not done the above compression, would you (or any one else who is willing) kindly take a moment and run this test for me?

Lastly, has anyone used to Acrobat to improve the OCR on the 1DollarScan pdf, assuming you paid only for the basic OCR and not the high quality OCR?

[ab78727]

Hi,

I actually use Acrobat to routinely compress the files I get back from Bookscan.us (I dropped my 1DS membership after a while). The size difference is astounding: some compressed books end up being 20% the size of the original scan. There is a time cost of course: my Core-i3 laptop can take many minutes to compress each file.

I have a lot of textbooks and the original color scan might result in a 500MB file - saving this file as "Reduced Size PDF" will often result in a 120MB file. For black-and-white-only scans (offered by Bookscan.us), a 40MB fiction book might be reduced to 15MB using the above trick. Thus, this Acrobat Pro feature has really helped me: my collection (in reduced size form) is currently at 13GB; without compression, I would probably have found a 64GB microsd card a tight fit. I personally found Bookscan.us's OCR adequate when I do my spot checks: I have used Adobe's OCR a few times on other documents but it takes way too long to run so I find the time penalty for the non-discernable improvement not valuable.

[jangell2]

Originally Posted by blue_skies

Some Feedback:

I ended up sending 13 books to http://bookscan.us/ a couple weeks ago. I sent them using USPS Media Mail. It cost $7.04 to ship and only $1 each to scan... so the total cost for 13 books was about $20.

Media Mail took a while to deliver, but once the books were received, the books were scanned and uploaded to a dropbox account very quickly.

The scans look fantastic. I was surprised that they even included not only book covers and backs, but also the entire book jacket when there was one.

I didn't get any additional upgrades. The 13 files are about 475 mb total. I will probably eventually OCR them, if I end up upgrading ABBY.

The service was wonderful. I looked over the scans and one PDF had one page with a corner turned over blocking some of the text. I emailed them, and they very quickly rescanned the page and uploaded the new PDF. Customer service was top-rate with very fast and thoughtful communication.

I highly recommend this service and will use them again in the future. It is so much faster and easier than scanning my own books, and a very good bargain.

I just visited their website and notice they have upgrades that will provide OCR and a docx (word) format. They will also convert to Kindle format. All this for extra $ but the prices seem quite reasonable to me when I consider the effort to scan in a book. No thank you. The docx formats that you get when not converting to Kindle seems more like what I want. They remove headers, footers, page from the word doc when doing the kindle conversion.

Thinking of getting Jutoh to convert the word doc to Kindle.

After years of waiting I have given up waiting on Memoirs of an Invisible Man to be published in Kindle format (or any ebook). I'm 69 and decided to start reading the book again and find the Kindle has ruined me for print. The font size on the pocket book is just too small.

Has anyone gotten a word doc from this outfit? Did they do a good job?