1DollarScan is the best option available currently in US so with bookfinder.com you can find/send directly to them and get the book reasonably well scanned.
> As a comparison, I randomly picked a Chinese scanning shop on Taobao and sent a book for scanning for 0.05 yuan, or $0.0071, per page.
> They delivered the PDF in less than two hours after receiving the book.
It would have been good to see how well they did in terms of OCR, image compression, etc., compared to 1DollarScan.
Author here — the image quality was comparable, if not better, which is understandable because both use pretty standard commercial scanners. An upside is that instead of cutting the binder as 1DollarScan does, they tore the pages from the seam, so the pages remained whole. They didn’t do any compression either.
Impressive they were able to get so many improvements from post-scan processing. Yet I can't imagine needing a PDF so badly it's worth the effort. I'd probably just try to buy a digital copy.
There a lotz of books without digital version, or it's region locked or the seller won't ship to your location.
> courts have found similar services infringing, most famously against Google Books
> “The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals,” Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote, explaining the court’s decision.
This is a dissimilar situation. The books are being scanned for personal use, the whole book is viewable, and money is changing hands. The best argument for fair use might be that the customer still has to buy a copy of the physical book, so the digital copy service isn’t necessarily eating away at the book publishers sales — though, the fact that they bought used undercuts that a little.
You seem to have me confused with someone else (such as the author, maybe—i.e. the person who injected the comparison to Google Books and wrote the part I quoted in my previous comment); except for the first two words in your comment, your reply doesn't make sense as a response to what I wrote here.
Btw for better results (and manual correction) ScanTailor is a handy tool.
https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced
1DollarScan is the best option available currently in US so with bookfinder.com you can find/send directly to them and get the book reasonably well scanned.
> As a comparison, I randomly picked a Chinese scanning shop on Taobao and sent a book for scanning for 0.05 yuan, or $0.0071, per page.
> They delivered the PDF in less than two hours after receiving the book.
It would have been good to see how well they did in terms of OCR, image compression, etc., compared to 1DollarScan.
Author here — the image quality was comparable, if not better, which is understandable because both use pretty standard commercial scanners. An upside is that instead of cutting the binder as 1DollarScan does, they tore the pages from the seam, so the pages remained whole. They didn’t do any compression either.
Impressive they were able to get so many improvements from post-scan processing. Yet I can't imagine needing a PDF so badly it's worth the effort. I'd probably just try to buy a digital copy.
There a lotz of books without digital version, or it's region locked or the seller won't ship to your location.
> courts have found similar services infringing, most famously against Google Books
Google was found not to be infringing.
You’re correct, but they were found not to be infringing because the courts said it was non commercial fair use, under this reasoning (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/business/media/googles-di...):
> “The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals,” Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote, explaining the court’s decision.
This is a dissimilar situation. The books are being scanned for personal use, the whole book is viewable, and money is changing hands. The best argument for fair use might be that the customer still has to buy a copy of the physical book, so the digital copy service isn’t necessarily eating away at the book publishers sales — though, the fact that they bought used undercuts that a little.
You seem to have me confused with someone else (such as the author, maybe—i.e. the person who injected the comparison to Google Books and wrote the part I quoted in my previous comment); except for the first two words in your comment, your reply doesn't make sense as a response to what I wrote here.