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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I have this amazing dream of a facility where I can bring in boxes of books and they hand me back a USB drive filled with pdf copies of those books.

I don't know how or when that would happen, but it would be glorious.

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http://1dollarscan.com/index.php

Haven't used them, but it might be worth a shot

I had a library of around 1000+ books; any book I couldn't get as a Kindle book, I had 1dollarscan.com scan. They did a phenomenal job.

No relation, just very satisfied with their results.

Is it allowed for all books? I've a few physical books that don't have digital versions, it would be nice to scan them and give the physical ones away.

I have yet to run into a book they wouldn't/couldn't scan.

After a quick scan, it looked like you have to use their own reader? Surely not?

You misread. They give you a PDF. I think their "reader" is just a PDF viewer that includes the ability to download your books from their site.

I tried them and the results were not great. They didn't OCR it (though I think they do now?) and the resulting PDF was pretty much unreadable on my Kindle.

On my old Kindle, I found pdfs in general were pretty bad--how was it on a computer?

Some universities do this. (Well, mine did at least). I think normally you had to pay, but I new a few people who talked the university into doing it for free for them. They also give you back the original books, spiral bound (they cut the spines off them in order to scan them).

You may be able to find a local university willing to do this for non-students.

They have this system at my local bank branch (I assume it's worldwide though, I hope at least) that you bring in a bag of coins, dump them into the slot and in a few seconds you've got a receipt to get that credited to your bank account. This for books would be great! Books go in, epubs come out!

snapbook in Japan does basically that. You pay 100 yen and send them a book and they send you back a pdf. http://snapbook.jp/

Thanks for the tip. 100 yen per book is pretty cheap.

I have the same dream about CDs and DVDs.

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