Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
I've been wanting to re-release her novels as ebooks, but haven't had a way to digitize them. This is perfect for me.
Even the original publishers have trouble with those. I was going to buy the ebook version of "Proofs from the Book", but downloaded the sample first from Amazon, and it was completely worthless. You'd have a line that would say something like (S in the following represents a capital Greek Sigma):
S( ) <= S( )
I checkout out a few other serious math books for Kindle, and although most weren't as bad as the above, I'd usually find some deal breaking errors in the handling of math symbols. For instance, I seem to recall one that would lose exponents of -1 if they were attached to a small letter. I didn't see anything else wrong...but it was an abstract algebra book, and it is customary to use multiplicative notation for groups, an so a^-1 is the customary notation for the inverse of a. Group theory gets very confusing when a^-1 gets replaced by a.
At this point, I don't think I'd buy a math book for Kindle even if the preview was flawless unless I was very sure that the preview included every mathematical symbol that would be used in the book, and in all the sizes they would be used in.
Because of that, I needed to convert a DjView file to PDF a few times. The thing is, I have yet to find a good djvu2pdf converter -- they create PDF files with ridiculous sizes, like 100 or even 500 MB and they are terribly slow. I got better results in terms of size when I tried printing from djvu viewer with PDF printer, and while the file size was good (10-40 MB) and quality was acceptable most of the time (depending on the initial quality of djvu), it was so goddamn slow and resource intensive that I stopped doing it altogether and went back to dead tree books -- converting ~400 pages djvu this way took about 3-4 hours on 2 years old laptop.
Also, my Kindle was really, really slow showing them -- turning pages took about 10 seconds. Everything else was fine, though -- math books aren't really meant to be read fast, so this was not a big problem.
Anyway, anybody knows a better way of doing that?
1) They list an "Accept direct shipment from Amazon" option (coming soon). Think about it: this means a book could be printed, sold, shipped to this company, scanned and destroyed without ever being read. Something is very odd here.
2) The business is located four blocks from my apartment. Maybe I'll try them out...
Resold as PDF files? Not by this company, anyway...I don't think that business model will work out legally.
Resold by shady third parties? Maybe.
Copied and bittorrented? Definitely.
I wonder. If the company holds onto the PDF and just sends out that PDF whenever someone mails in a book already scanned, isn't this the equivalent of those music services which simply make you prove through uploading music that you already have a copy and then give you access to their one stored version of that song? I think this has also been done with DVDs as well. So why not books?
Would you be okay with them no longer being bound? They saw off the binding so they can use them in a sheetfed scanner.
Yet, the address is of a parking lot... (10 E 3rd Street in San Jose). Strange.
With an aging population it seems this is a very natural niche.
Now if it were only OnePoundScan instead of OneDollarScan...
Edit: http://1dollarscan.com/pricing.php says "OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. The PDFs will contain the OCR text layer behind the images to make the text searchable and selectable." This service is labelled free so I guess you get it (or can get it) for each scan.
It is sad that many hundreds of thousands of hours have been wasted by students photocopying books :(
Now I'm curious, how much does a library charge for a lost book?
Especially in the case of required textbooks.
The digital photography method is certainly less destructive, but hugely more expensive & time consuming. A $15,000 scanner can do 120+ sheets per minute... The pricing for book pages seems very solid (keep in mind that scanning is quoted in impressions, so your 100 sheets is 50 pages double sided, if I'm not mistaken)
So for your scheme to work accurately they'd have to try to keep track of that.
I think it's too risky, and would go with "scan the exact book in."
In somewhat-analogous circumstances almost 30 years ago, a court said "no." The case was Micro-Sparc, Inc. v. Amtype Corp., 592 F.Supp. 33, 34-35, 223 USPQ (BNA) 1210 (D. Mass. 1984). The defendant offered a keyboarding service: It typed in the source code of programs published in a hobbyist magazine, then sold disks to purchasers of the magazine. The court rejected a fair-use defense and held that this infringed the copyright in the programs. (Adapted from a chapter in a treatise I published long ago.)
That the subject was a computer program is what seemed to trip up the case in my opinion.
Buy a ScanSnap s1500m for $420. It does double sided scans at 20 ppm but that doesn't include OCR time or paper jams. Let's guess it averages 500 pages an hour.
Pay a neighbor kid $10 an hour to cut and scan.
Even if I sold the scanner when I was done, this is still way cheaper. It's a shame they don't scan things besides books. Although, I'm not sure I want to send my old tax forms to a sweatshop...
It sounds like they do. Homepage says books/photos/business cards/documents/greeting cards.
Of course it's necessary because not all publishers release digital versions or they release it with a ton of DRM, etc..
Still, it's a bit sad.
googling "service to convert cd to mp3" just found a bunch of them.
I think they scan new books, once they have one scan in inventory, they don't have to scan it again. When you send them your book, it's proof you owned one and they send you a PDF. That is, they don't scan all individual books --so if yours had margin notes, that would be lost, I believe.
Other than that, I could definitely see this helping with my foreign language studies. Especially Japanese, as the company appears to do a lot of books in that language.
Though, after thinking about the cost of shipping, book, etc, I'm not sure I'd send much... It'd be only things that I really, really want to read and just haven't learned the vocab for yet. And there really isn't much of that.
What happens when they need to charge more (or less) than one dollar? Also, they're also locking themselves into the "scanning" market with the word 'scan' in their domain name.
Why would they need to charge more? And the nice thing about computer tech is that with dropping costs, you don't have to change the price, just the quantity each $1 buys you...
(Right now $1 only buys you 100 pages, which is an awful small book.)
It would be a waste of the resources invested in the production of that physical book to not find some productive use for that copy.
A potential compromise, if simply giving out the same PDF is legal, is them offering a big option saying "Our records indicate we have this book on file! Do you want us to immediately send you a PDF copy when we receive your book [potentially discounted pricing or even a percentage of resell profits], or would you like to wait for a scan?" So yeah, now they have to do something with the hard copies, either resell or donate.
Edit: No need to speculate, they claim to shred and recycle everything after processing.
The legal key to their business (and to similar businesses such as CD ripping services) is that it is arguably fair use for the owner of a particular copy to make additional copies for his own personal use.
Given that, it is not a copyright violation for a third party (them) to provide a service to help the owner of the copy to make those fair use copies.