My grandmother, who passed away last week, was an author. She self-published two novels through a printer who typeset her books and printed a few hundred copies. I don't know what happened to the original text files she gave her printer and I know she never got a digital typeset copy.
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.
By the way, if anyone is interested, I'm also republishing my grandmother's short, inspirational writings on this blog: http://goldenwriter.caryme.com/.
I was really hoping that the Google Books project would solve this problem for regular people. I know they take collections from public libraries and OCR them. Why not do the same for private collections?
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( )
where there were supposed to be things inside the parenthesis.
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.
I've been reading quite a lot math books on a Kindle recently, but I didn't bother to convert them to a native format -- I've been using PDFs.
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.
What I noticed about this company, after checking their website:
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...
Article doesn't mention a big audience that would be very interested in cheap book scanning: the print disabled. Blind and partially-sighted people are the most obvious members of this group but dyslexics and others who cannot read normal print would also benefit. Many books are of course already available through libraries for the blind but if you need less-popular or specialised texts you are out of luck.
With an aging population it seems this is a very natural niche.
Now if it were only OnePoundScan instead of OneDollarScan...
I think this is one of the hidden benefits of going digital with books. The selection of large print books is very weak, but with a kindle (or similar) suddenly every book is a large print book and many can be played as automated audio books as well.
I came here to say the same thing. I can't read printed books at all. Even large print ones are a struggle. I just have to have the back light of my iPad or computer screen to see what I'm reading, in addition to the increased font size. I have a lot of books that I love that aren't available in digital format, mostly due to their age. I think I may well be taking advantage of this service.
The video indicated that the binding for the book was being cut off. I suspect that will prevent students from borrowing books from the library, getting them scanned via this service, and returning them.
It is sad that many hundreds of thousands of hours have been wasted by students photocopying books :(
I run a photo scanning company in Canada (http://photoscanning.ca) and I was seriously surprised at the number of people asking for this service. I get a ton of teachers that are looking to have their material on their laptop instead of lugging everything around, students wanting their texts on their iPads, etc. We haven't officially done it yet as I hadn't looked into the copyright issue as much as I should, but may in the future.
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)
The way the current rules are written for fair-use, if two people send in an identical book, are they allowed to send the same PDF to both rather than scanning twice? I wonder how the governing bodies would view that.
Side-note, I think it'd be interesting if if they collected/published data about what books are sent in, and from where.
> if two people send in an identical book, are they allowed to send the same PDF to both rather than scanning twice?
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.)
To be very accurate, they'd have to keep track of slip streamed versions. I had a maddening email debate with some friends some years ago over what the ARM said. We were all using the same "edition," but we finally worked out that they were actually different. Stroustrup or his publisher wanted to correct something without actually changing the edition number.
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."
I want to do this with all my books and paperwork (old bills, receipts, notes from college, photographs (crappy snapshots, really)). This was my plan:
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...
This is a cool idea but it is a bit sad that it is necessary. Sad because it is wasteful. Books are written in a digital format. So we are using natural resources to make them, turning them into digital (which they already were, and probably in a better format then PDF like LaTeX, specially for technical books), and then destroying the physical copies after they consumed resources.
Of course it's necessary because not all publishers release digital versions or they release it with a ton of DRM, etc..
Would something similar make sense for say music cd's, dvd's etc? I for one would love to send someone my media collection, and have it ripped into lossless format and put on cloud. In order to get around piracy issues etc maybe the entire collection can be digitally signed by my public key...
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.
Book scanning is actually a great tool for University students. I know that a lot of the actual University libraries are trying to go digital, but in the mean time being able to quickly find specific passages by utilizing the find function makes for a much easier day at the old study hall. This sort of idea could certainly pick up traction around schools for the next few years.
I was all there, until it said 'PDF'. For my purposes I need a more accessible format.
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.
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.
> What happens when they need to charge more (or less) than one dollar?
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 $1 only buys you 100 pages, which is an awful small book.)
This would be a great business if you got to keep your book.
Ie: instead of 1$, pay 5$ for the first 100 sheets but no spine-cutting and you get the book back intact after.
Much more worth it!
They should have a student plan. I see this being very useful for college and university students like me. Your one tablet could contain all of your books and manual!
[+] [-] caryme|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] caryme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jianshen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jberryman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
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):
where there were supposed to be things inside the parenthesis.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.
[+] [-] mikeknoop|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzyz|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Bud|14 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] sigil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squirrel|14 years ago|reply
With an aging population it seems this is a very natural niche.
Now if it were only OnePoundScan instead of OneDollarScan...
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kellishaver|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iqster|14 years ago|reply
It is sad that many hundreds of thousands of hours have been wasted by students photocopying books :(
[+] [-] smackfu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
Now I'm curious, how much does a library charge for a lost book?
[+] [-] mahyarm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matdwyer|14 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] mp3jeep01|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dctoedt|14 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] sixtofour|14 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] tricky|14 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] tapp|14 years ago|reply
It sounds like they do. Homepage says books/photos/business cards/documents/greeting cards.
[+] [-] yariang|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] signa11|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] there|14 years ago|reply
googling "service to convert cd to mp3" just found a bunch of them.
[+] [-] jasongullickson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] int3rnaut|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonnycowboy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] proee|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] eru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnycowboy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TechnoFou|14 years ago|reply
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