Quote:
Originally Posted by sufue
Back in the days when a lot of my favorite authors/titles weren't available as e-books, I used a service called bookscan.us and was very happy with their work. They offered several choices for the service: just a basic PDF scan, a cropped PDF scan to be bigger on an e-reader, a PDF scan with OCR, etc. I mostly used the cropped PDF scans, and was pleased with the results.
They were sometimes a little slow, but I tended to send them a big box full of used books at a time, so I understood if they didn't do it all at once.
I haven't used them for a while, since there are only a few authors/titles I want that are not in e-book now, and I already have PDF scans of almost all of them. But I don't know why their service would have changed much.
They do destroy the book in the process...
There are also a couple of other services that do the same thing that are probably pretty good too, I just haven't used them.
|
My somewhat educated guess is that there are still such services out there, although yours is the first mention of one that I remember seeing in a long while.
There is a "Fair Use" provision in the U.S. law(s) which allows a person to photocopy bits and pieces of a copyrighted item; perhaps that it is what pdurrant referred to when he spoke of photocopying "
bits that you want to quote." I'm sure that they have some similar fair-use provisions in the law(s) of the U.K. as they do in the U.S.
Someone mentioned the scanning service tearing off the spine; another person mentioned that some destroy the (paper-based) book. I'm sure that both are intended to accomplish the same purpose--to make the original either unusable or unavailable anymore. It makes sense--an author and publisher will not lose possible royalties or profits (or very much, anyway) from that process. There is basically just an exchange of one book (paper-based) for another one (digitally-based). Nothing lost; nothing gained. It's basically just an exchange of one for the other.