Freeing up shelf space - converting paper books to pdf

I stumbled on a reference to this company, 1DollarScan that offers a service to take your paper book and scan it to a PDF. Don't know anything about them. Was wondering if anyone has used them. Seems to have popped up last summer. They will take your books and slice off the spine and scan the pages into a PDF. Looks like you can pay a little extra and have an index of the text created. Cost is $1/100 pages. The files are quite large, 400 pages could be 80-160 MB.

They will destroy the book once it is scanned. It looks like that is the way they are getting around the copyright issues.

Looks like a clever way to make some shelf space - now if PDF's could be brought into Logos that would be great.

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Comments

Michael Anda

Do you know if the PDF's they provide are text files, or image files?

George Somsel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/334523#Comment_334523

Do you know if the PDF's they provide are text files, or image files?

If they provide text files you then need to be concerned about the quality of the OCR software. I would guess that the resulting texts would be rife with typos.

Bruce Roth

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/334523#Comment_334523

From the FAQ.

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a technology that enables
images into searchable data. After we scan your book, each letter in
your book will be searchable. It is no 100% accuracy but it works.

And:

If you want High Quality OCR, please select High Qualtiy Touch Up option, this would be much better than standard OCR option.

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 is only available for “books”.

Looks like an extra $1 per set (100 pages), can't tell if this is High Quality Touch Up or the basic.

David Ames

They will destroy the book once it is scanned. It looks like that is the way they are getting around the copyright issues.

Am not a lawyer BUT make sure you get the remains of the book back - if the book is in copyright then you need the remains of the book to show that you have the legal right to have the PDF file of the book under the FAIR USE part of the US Copyright Law. [[Just like the CD you made a MP3 out of - Have the original and you are OK - No original then you are seen as a pirate by the copyright holder and the jury]]

Michael Anda

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/334542#Comment_334542

I have a resource called the Puritan Hard Drive that uses scanned PDF documents that are images of the original books, but ALSO have OCR generated indices that allow for searches. They're usable, but I much prefer to view standard, ascii generated text, of course. I really have an aversion to purchasing paper based books these days.