If I could have every a single of the books upon my groaning bookshelves converted to EPUB format and shrunk to fit my iPad or Kindle, afterwards I’d do it in a second. Or rather than, I’d pay someone else to do it in the second. Yusuke Ohki, spurred on by a twin motives of the the typically little Japanese unit and the miss of indolence, not usually scanned 2,000 of his own books, but proposed the company to do it for people similar to me.

The company is called BookScan, as well as you can have his 120-strong group of employees modify your paper books into electrons* for around a dollar (¥1,000) per book. The books have been ripped into individual sheets as well as a scans are returned to you as PDFs. Once the tough work of digitizing has been finished you can set your own mechanism to work processing to EPUB or other e-book formats. You can opt to have a scans “tuned” to your device, with margins trimmed for phones as well as colors removed for Kindle. After scanning, a books are dumped.

The iPad has fueled a sharp enlarge in direct for e-books in Japan, as well as nonetheless there is still no homogeneous of Amazon’s Kindle store to supply them. Thus, people have taken to scanning.

Sound informed? Remember when the usually approach to get your song onto your MP3 player was to slice your own CDs? And look where which led: The music attention almost broken itself until Apple as well as iTunes yanked a music folks’ common head from the sand as well as proposed offered a song. Every time I can’t find a book I wish upon Kindle, I think that a book publishers have been going a same way. Especially if mass-scanning takes off as well as suddenly the internet is awash with DRM-free PDFs.

What about y’all, Gadget Lab readers? Would you compensate to have your books scanned, clearing your shelves of passed trees? Or do you still like to leaf through your cook-books with the glass of wine, determining what’s for cooking? Or should we only get free e-books for every genuine book we own? Answers in the comments.

BookScan product page [BookScan around Bloomberg]

Photo: BookScan

* I realize they already enclose electrons, but you know what I’m removing during here.