[wpietri]

One business I kinda want to exist is a book warehouse/scanning operation. I send them boxes of books; they give me an app with access to digital versions of every book I send them. The whole operation is somewhere in, say, Nebraska, so storage cost is very low.

[flakiness]

Similar scanning services exist in Japan as well (ex. [1]). The difference is that they kindly discard the books for you once getting scanned!

[1] https://www.bookscan.co.jp/

[SolonIslandus]

Something like this?

https://1dollarscan.com/sp/

[wintermutestwin]

$.01 per page and they are based in Fremont, CA.

This looks like a cheaper way to get most ebooks and you can ship the books direct from Amazon. If enough people did this, maybe ebook pricing will come down to something rational.

[ghaff]

>maybe ebook pricing will come down to something rational.

Why don't you think it's rational? Note that the cost to print and distribute a printed book is only about $2 of its cost. Or don't you think authors, editors, etc. should be able to earn money?

[wintermutestwin]

I frequently see Kindle pricing as higher than print. If ebook prices were 2$ less, I'd be more inclined to buy some. If they were 50% less, I'd buy 10x more. If the author got a higher cut, I'd also be more inclined to give these middlemen my money. As it is, I buy used print books most of the time...

[ghaff]

Book pricing can be weird at times but Kindle is usually cheaper than new print. But, yes, more than used. Though I'll often buy Kindle for fiction anyway because I don't really want physical books. (And, to be honest, I read a lot fewer books than I used to in any case. I'm definitely time/attention limited rather than money. Ebooks could be free and I wouldn't read a lot more.)

[mattowen_uk]

For a while there existed services that did this with your CD collection. You'd send them a crate of your music CDs and they'd send back all the music ripped as mp3s.

Obviously, they didn't re-rip music they'd already ripped so technically for popular music, you got 'someone else's' mp3s.

---

My multi function laser printer has a duplex scanner on it. It can scan pages at quite a rate. The problem is not the scanning, but the accurate OCRing, and for things like magazines, the storage of all those high resolution pages. Right now, I cut out the articles I want to keep from my monthly mags, and just scan those. It seems like a fair compromise right now.

[pbhjpbhj]

Also, in UK with our strict "fair-dealing" (as opposed to USA's Fair Use) none of this is lawful - including ripping CDs for personal use (though that format-shifting was briefly allowed for a couple of years).

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion; not legal advice.