scan my books

May 27, 2008 1:18 PM

Low volume, book scanning service? I want to ship to these people my (recent, copyrighted) paper- and hardbacks, and they scan them, destroy them, ocr them, proof them, and email me back a pdf. I have many books that I want to reference, but I like to move a lot, and they're weighing me down.

There are a few places on the web that might go along with this. I'm looking for personal experiences. (As far as I can tell, this is in the fair use gray area, I won't share my digital copy, blah, blah, blah.) Thanks!

posted by zeek321 to technology (11 comments total)

I would like to know this too. I have the same problem. A Yahoo Answers result turned up Scandex Systems, based in Tampa, Florida. Unfortunately I have no personal experience with them or any other service.
posted by Monochrome at 1:44 PM on May 27

Most students DIY this. The scanning quickly becomes almost as fast as photocopying. Modern OCR software adds a transparent text layer above the image, making proofreading unnecessary for most purposes.
posted by stereo at 1:44 PM on May 27

Another idea (in the legal dark gray area) is to search for ebooks of your content. If the book is popular enough, someone else has already scanned and OCR'd it.
posted by Monochrome at 1:48 PM on May 27

@ stereo - I want to avoid doing it myself as much as possible. I've done it for one book, and it was a huge pain with mediocre results. I'm sure it would go infinitely better the second time, but minimal time spent and convenience are the most important things to me at the moment. I'd really like to offload this. Maybe I should just craigslist it out, but I want it handled by a professional who's done hundreds. I'm answering my own question, but maybe elance.com under data entry??
posted by zeek321 at 4:04 PM on May 27

I bought an Opticbook 3600 two years ago and I haven't looked back. Couple of hours plopped down in front of a movie = ebook. Now I have an entire technical reference library on a subnotebook (Asus EEE) that's smaller than a typical hardcover book.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 5:59 PM on May 27 [1 favorite]

I used to contract for eBook conversion professionally, and no vendor ever cared to inquire about copyright, so you probably don't have to worry too much about that. The service you want costs about $1/page at volume, outsourced to India or Barbados. If this seems prohibitive, think about what you're asking for: a human will have to feed the pages through a scanner--a process that is only semi-automated at best--then actually proof the OCR'd results. Each book will take dozens of hours for even slapdash results, more for anything more complicated than nonillustrated fiction.

It would be much easier and cheaper to simply buy published eBook versions of the books you need. If the publisher hasn't made a particular title available in the format you want, you can always ask. Enough queries may get even backlist titles into the conversion queue.
posted by libraryhead at 6:38 PM on May 27

I think you overestimate the professionalism OP wants, libraryhead. I can't think of any reason why this job needs to be more than $10 / hour, which really means he should find some kid down the street, and give him work for a couple Saturdays.
posted by gensubuser at 6:52 PM on May 27

Thanks, all. These are helpful perspectives.
posted by zeek321 at 8:41 PM on May 27

Ok, this exchange gave me a better sense of what to google. Here are a few things. Unfortunately, they don't post quotes, so I don't know how much it'd cost to digitize, say, 20 400 page books. But for those following this:

http://www.kirtas.com/digitization.html
http://www.ristech.ca/services.html

The Opticbook 3600 looks a little clunky to me, but I might still go that way.
posted by zeek321 at 8:59 PM on May 27

If you're willing to destroy the books (I think Kinkos can cut bindings off very cleanly) I would highly recommend a Fujitsu Snapscan S510 sheet-fed duplex scanner. This will go far more quickly than using something like the Opticbook and keeping the books bound.
posted by david06 at 10:08 PM on May 27

I'll second the recommendation on the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M, but using it does involve removing pages. It's fast, cheap, and scans both sides of a page with one pass.
posted by ju at 12:02 PM on May 28