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

[gardenstate]

A Japanese Company opened up in the United States and charges $1 each to scan and digitize your paper book. PRO - low cost way to convert your library & now you can view it on you ereader CON - book spine is cut to allow pages to be scanned easily

http://www.forbes.com/sites/booked/2...tner=yahoofeed

[Prestidigitweeze]

It's a great idea, but don't forget:

People are still going to have to proof and format the digital copies against the cut-spined originals.

Still, certain books in my collection warrant that kind of attention.

[Skibble]

Unfortunately, the books I would most like to digitize are precisely the ones I could not bear to see destroyed -- Victorian histories, rare books on archaeology, etc. Even if the purpose was to digitize them so I wouldn't have to keep the books anymore myself, I wouldn't want to ruin them in the process. Someone else might want them! They're such lovely volumes!

[HarryT]

I suspect that this may fall foul of the law. It's one thing to scan books yourself; it's far from clear whether paying someone else to do it for you still falls under the scope of "fair use". It'll be interesting to see if they do get taken to court over this.

[wayrad]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

People are still going to have to proof and format the digital copies against the cut-spined originals.

True. I've always found proofing and formatting to be at least 90% of the work.

This scanning service might be a good option for those with only one or two books to scan, but I should think that the break-even point between shipping costs to Japan and the purchase of an inexpensive scanner with a basic bundled OCR application would be reached rather quickly.

[jabberwock_11]

There is no shipping to Japan, the company has opened a US location, which was sort of the point of the article. Their web site lists them as being in San Jose, CA.

The downside is that the $1 is per 100 pages and the files will be PDFs, which are not the easiest critters to convert into other formats without themselves needing serious proofing and format tweaking. Still not having to scan and proof an entire book yourself might make it worth the cost, especially for paperbacks. I HATE scanning and proofing.

Here's a direct link to their web site: http://1dollarscan.com/about.php

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I suspect that this may fall foul of the law. It's one thing to scan books yourself; it's far from clear whether paying someone else to do it for you still falls under the scope of "fair use". It'll be interesting to see if they do get taken to court over this.

I say this would be perfectly fine in my jurisdiction. It's a private copy for somebody else's exclusive use, our Copyright Act allows for that. Why do you think that's an issue? People obviously did buy a copy (heck, it's destroyed in the process), so this is really only format shifting.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by jabberwock_11

The downside is that the $1 is per 100 pages and the files will be PDFs, which are not the easiest critters to convert into other formats without themselves needing serious proofing and format tweaking.

That sounds like they are just scanning them as images, you'd have to do the whole OCR process yourself?

Still not having to scan and proof an entire book yourself might make it worth the cost, especially for paperbacks. I HATE scanning and proofing.

If they did a good job, I'd be tempted. Yes I can scan them myself, but my time is worth more than $1 per 200 pages. The risk is that they do a crappy job, with missing or misaligned pages, and the original book is gone.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

I say this would be perfectly fine in my jurisdiction. It's a private copy for somebody else's exclusive use, our Copyright Act allows for that. Why do you think that's an issue? People obviously did buy a copy (heck, it's destroyed in the process), so this is really only format shifting.

To be formal about it, you could transfer legal ownership of the book to them, they then scan in their own copy of the book, destroy the paper version and transfer ownership of the electronic version to you.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

I say this would be perfectly fine in my jurisdiction. It's a private copy for somebody else's exclusive use, our Copyright Act allows for that. Why do you think that's an issue? People obviously did buy a copy (heck, it's destroyed in the process), so this is really only format shifting.

It is format shifting, but I'm not sure if it's OK for someone else to do the format shifting for you. I may of course be wrong. Time will tell!

[pholy]

For a buck, will they do a job as good as Google's book scan?

[Phogg]

A scanner runs $59 for a new one if you hit a sale at office depot.

I wouldn.t pay to have any conversions done thate weren't to proofed .EPub or .Mobi.
Most of the works I want done are out of print,

I would want to send them off to the author or their heirs and lobby them to get them back on the market.

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by Phogg

A scanner runs $59 for a new one if you hit a sale at office depot.

It's simple, it depends on how much your time is worth (to you and in general). 1$ for 100 pages? I'd sign up in a heartbeat if I didn't care too much about my pbooks to see them destroyed in the process (and the service were available over here, which it is not).

[RainingLemur]

On one hand, I'd like to be able to scan some of my paper books to add them to the ereader... But, I couldn't bring myself to destroy them in the fashion required to do so using this method.

[Dulin's Books]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

I say this would be perfectly fine in my jurisdiction. It's a private copy for somebody else's exclusive use, our Copyright Act allows for that. Why do you think that's an issue? People obviously did buy a copy (heck, it's destroyed in the process), so this is really only format shifting.

because after they transfer the digital copy to you they would/could retain a digital copy of their own , which would run afoul of the copyright restrictions