Someday my grandchildren will ask me what a printed book looks like. Hell, at the rate we’re going, my children will probably ask the same question. The physical to digital conversion of books just got a lot cheaper with the launch of 1DollarScan.com, based in San Jose, California. An offshoot of the immensely successful BookScan in Japan, 1DollarScan does exactly what its name implies: it scans your documents for a dollar. 100 pages of a book, 10 pages of a business document, 10 business card, etc – you just mail the text in and 1DollarScan will email you back a PDF. While the transition away from print media has been proceeding a pace for a while now, a cheap book scanning service in the US means that thousands of personal libraries will be converted to ones and zeroes, pushing us ever closer to a world where all printed books (Gutenberg to Gladwell) belong in a museum.
Yusuke Ohki started BookScan after he laboriously converted his personal library of 2000+ volumes into digital documents. Now the company has 200+ employees who do nothing but that, and reportedly the service is so popular in Japan there’s an extensive waiting list. 1DollarScan promises to bring the same dependable, quick, and hopefully popular service to the US with its freshly debuted Silicon Valley headquarters. The following video was made for BookScan, not 1DollarScan, so it’s only available in Japanese, but you can see the basic components of the technology in action. Send, slice, scan, and email. From book to PDF in about two weeks. We’ve seen better machines, but 1DollarScan makes scanning books simple, and simple sells.
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