Convert your paper books to ebooks

As part of an effort to simplify my life, I’m donating things I don’t need/use, recycling and in some cases I’m digitizing. My digitizing started with lots of docs in my home inbox (product manuals, articles, receipts). Then I looked at my bookshelf. While there were a handful of books with sentimental value, the majority would be better accessed electronically – and would take up less space as well.

I started by scanning a couple paperback books that were less that 200 pages. The process was slow (disassemble the book, cut the inner edge, scan with the automatic document feeder). It worked ok for small books – not great for hardcover or 200+ paged books. Then I discovered 1DollarScan.

Purchase scanning credits online, send the books (cheaper via USPS media mail) to 1DollarScan. The company scans the book, and converts them into PDFs making the results available via download or DVD. (overview of the process here )

Pricing is reasonable at $1 per 100 pages of a book. I figured that my average price (including shipping) was about $4-5 per book. 1DollarScan also has a promotion that includes free optical character recognition which provides a text file in addition to a graphical PDF.

I have already sent in 15 books for scanning and look forward to trimming down the books in my office while making the books more accessible via my iPad.

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