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by CydeWeys
3901 days ago
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1dollarscan doesn't seem that good to me, what am I missing? It's $2 per 100 pages if you want OCR, and even then it's not clear what output format they're delivering -- it sounds like it's still a PDF? The entire point of eBooks to me is that you end up with actual text, not just scans. And $8 per average length novel seems like a lot just to chop a book in half, throw it through an auto-feed scanner, and run an OCR program. |
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For a textbook style book "chopping it in half and throwing it in a scanner" is a bit more work than the sentence would suggest. The most cost effective scanner for this is the Scansnap 1500 as it will scan both sides of a page, has a 100 sheet "feeder", and will OCR the text (using ABBYY which is included). It screws up occasionally and especially on magazines which are very thin / shiny paper it can take a while (and several rescans) to get the magazine scanned. So in general there is a pretty solid time advantage to using 1dollarscan. Especially if you can use your nights and weekends productively doing something else.
That said, once I didn't have another stack of 10,000 pages to go at the end of the month (I had scanned all the "obvious" targets, minus the McGraw-Hill books which they won't scan) I did switch over to manual mode with my scanner because while the total cost of the cutter and scanner was close to $2,000 (not quite 2 years worth of 1dollar scan services) it is a capability that can sit idle without too much cost.