Book scanning for $1 anyone?

A novel service, 1DollarScan, launched in the US last week and builds on the successes of their Japanese counterpart Bookscan. 1DollarScan scans and digitises books, documents and photos for as little as $1.

As more and more of our reading is done on electronic devices like the Kindle, tablets and to a lesser extent laptops and desktops, and people wish to free up space in their homes, demand for digitisation services has seemingly soared.

The service is simple. Users post their material to 1DollarScan where it is scanned, digitised and has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) applied if necessary. The digital document is then returned as a PDF download or DVD. Even better, if you don’t require your original material to be returned, 1DollarScan will recycle it after two weeks automatically.

A ten page business document, one hundred pages from a book or ten photos cost just $1 to process. So you can expect a 300 page book to cost around €2.11 here in Europe to digitise.

The service will likely be enjoyed by avid book worms, but may also assist amateur heritage enthusiasts in publishing materials online.