They charge 100 yen for doing a book conversion. That's only about $1.25 US. I would kill for a service like this. I'm preparing to move in about a month, and I've got some 500 books that I need to move. I would love to just digitize the majority of these and get rid of the physical volumes.

This actually sounds like a fantastic service that the publishers could offer if they were progressive enough. They would prepare a digital copy of the books they offer (if they don't have them already). Then customers could ship them their physical volumes for destruction along with a nominal fee ($1-$2) in return for the digital version.