5 ms·

May I ask where you scanned your books? I've used 1dollarscan.com before for some book scans, which worked pretty well.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist. I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and assorted other magazines.
- shmulkey18 11y ago
  What kind of guillotine paper cutter did you purchase? How many page books can it cut through?
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    This one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BQGK1FQ/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BQGK1FQ/ although I replaced some of the clamp hardware as it didn't hold glossy magazines as well as I would have liked.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  1dollarscan doesn't seem that good to me, what am I missing? It's $2 per 100 pages if you want OCR, and even then it's not clear what output format they're delivering -- it sounds like it's still a PDF? The entire point of eBooks to me is that you end up with actual text, not just scans. And $8 per average length novel seems like a lot just to chop a book in half, throw it through an auto-feed scanner, and run an OCR program.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    When I started scanning my library I signed up for the "platinum" program which is $100 for 100 sets (basically 10,000 pages) with most of the enrichments turned on (OCR, etc) I paid the $1/set uplift for 600 dpi for technical documents with complex diagrams and occasionally I opted for color scans for some things. For a textbook style book "chopping it in half and throwing it in a scanner" is a bit more work than the sentence would suggest. The most cost effective scanner for this is the Scansnap 1500 as it will scan both sides of a page, has a 100 sheet "feeder", and will OCR the text (using ABBYY which is included). It screws up occasionally and especially on magazines which are very thin / shiny paper it can take a while (and several rescans) to get the magazine scanned. So in general there is a pretty solid time advantage to using 1dollarscan. Especially if you can use your nights and weekends productively doing something else. That said, once I didn't have another stack of 10,000 pages to go at the end of the month (I had scanned all the "obvious" targets, minus the McGraw-Hill books which they won't scan) I did switch over to manual mode with my scanner because while the total cost of the cutter and scanner was close to $2,000 (not quite 2 years worth of 1dollar scan services) it is a capability that can sit idle without too much cost.
    - CydeWeys 11y ago
      Do you share your scans (ignoring legality here), or are they all strictly personal?
      - ChuckMcM 11y ago
        No, I don't share them. The goal was to have my library be portable, and to a lesser extent more easily moved/preserved. These days I try to buy my reference books in a portable electronic form whenever possible.
petra 11y ago
Actually , if you're outside the u.s. and you're interested in buying a book that's not availble electronically from Amazon, the cheaper way is usually send it from Amazon directly to 1dollarscan, and they send you the scanned ebook by email.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  This is not an approach I had thought about - what is the turn around time?
  - petra 11y ago
    It's a bit long , unless you're willing to pay some more, you need to look at their pricing page.

1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist. I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and assorted other magazines.

shmulkey18 11y ago
What kind of guillotine paper cutter did you purchase? How many page books can it cut through?
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  This one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BQGK1FQ/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BQGK1FQ/ although I replaced some of the clamp hardware as it didn't hold glossy magazines as well as I would have liked.
CydeWeys 11y ago
1dollarscan doesn't seem that good to me, what am I missing? It's $2 per 100 pages if you want OCR, and even then it's not clear what output format they're delivering -- it sounds like it's still a PDF? The entire point of eBooks to me is that you end up with actual text, not just scans. And $8 per average length novel seems like a lot just to chop a book in half, throw it through an auto-feed scanner, and run an OCR program.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  When I started scanning my library I signed up for the "platinum" program which is $100 for 100 sets (basically 10,000 pages) with most of the enrichments turned on (OCR, etc) I paid the $1/set uplift for 600 dpi for technical documents with complex diagrams and occasionally I opted for color scans for some things. For a textbook style book "chopping it in half and throwing it in a scanner" is a bit more work than the sentence would suggest. The most cost effective scanner for this is the Scansnap 1500 as it will scan both sides of a page, has a 100 sheet "feeder", and will OCR the text (using ABBYY which is included). It screws up occasionally and especially on magazines which are very thin / shiny paper it can take a while (and several rescans) to get the magazine scanned. So in general there is a pretty solid time advantage to using 1dollarscan. Especially if you can use your nights and weekends productively doing something else. That said, once I didn't have another stack of 10,000 pages to go at the end of the month (I had scanned all the "obvious" targets, minus the McGraw-Hill books which they won't scan) I did switch over to manual mode with my scanner because while the total cost of the cutter and scanner was close to $2,000 (not quite 2 years worth of 1dollar scan services) it is a capability that can sit idle without too much cost.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    Do you share your scans (ignoring legality here), or are they all strictly personal?
    - ChuckMcM 11y ago
      No, I don't share them. The goal was to have my library be portable, and to a lesser extent more easily moved/preserved. These days I try to buy my reference books in a portable electronic form whenever possible.

petra 11y ago

Actually , if you're outside the u.s. and you're interested in buying a book that's not availble electronically from Amazon, the cheaper way is usually send it from Amazon directly to 1dollarscan, and they send you the scanned ebook by email.

danieltillett 11y ago
This is not an approach I had thought about - what is the turn around time?
- petra 11y ago
  It's a bit long , unless you're willing to pay some more, you need to look at their pricing page.