Big Recommendation for 1DollarScan!

What an amazing service!

They will scan your books at the rate of 100 pages for a buck. What’s the catch: they recycle the book, so you don’t get it back.

I needed to test this out.

But, what could I sacrifice? I settled on an atlas from 1960 that had been among my dad’s stuff when he passed away.

I love old atlases that show things that aren’t there any more, and I had no special attachment to this physical book … so off it went.

For $2 I was able to download a 400 Mb PDF file of all 184 pages of the book. It took about a month.

And I am so pleased with the quality. Here is my state, scanned from what was perhaps a 10 x 13 page:

The image above is actually a thumbnail managed by Typepad; if you want to see the real deal, click here.

But you’d probably like to see the detail, so here’s my county at 4x magnification:

Note that I-15 wasn’t built yet, and that route 61 is shown as a major road … even though it is now a gravel road out to a ghost town, and no longer carries that state route number. A local expert might note that the shading for mountains is more artistic than accurate.

And if you go down to 64x, here are the individual pixels, clear and readable:

Also, they scanned all the tables and the index, and they’re clear and readable. Here’s a snapshot in time of when Las Vegas was not a major city of the world, but London, Ontario was … and when atlases used to include great data like this:

The image above is actually a thumbnail managed by Typepad; if you want to see the real deal, click here.

I can’t wait to start getting rid of some other books this way.

Hat tip to bookofjoe for pointing me to this service.

Technorati Tags: 1dollarscan,atlas

Comments

[Alvin Smith]

Book Scan US (bookscan.us) is the first in US for scanning books and less expensive for the service. They will introduce the new price structure soon and I believe the half the price with including many other free options. They can convert the file to other formats like .epub and .mobi (kindle) also. Check it out.

[Dave Tufte]

I have a stack of books to be scanned, so I'll try this service too!