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Remote Book Scanning with 1DollarScan and Optimizing Scanned PDFs
Last month, I got interested in a textbook recommended by an online open course I happened to find. However, it’s quite old and not easily available for international shipping. Plus, since it’s a reader meant to be read non-sequentially and piecemeal, carrying it in its 600-page physical form seems to defeat the purpose. That was when I thought of the book scanning services I had heard about in the past and decided to try 1DollarScan.com, a service mentioned in multiple Hacker News threads.
Amusingly, the two add-ons that are selected by default — OCR ($1) and file names matching book titles ($1) — almost invite an instant opt-out, given how easily you can self-service. As for the scanned book itself, the image quality was generally good, but the contrast erred on the lower side, making the serifs on some letters fade; some pages are also slightly skewed by 0.5–1 degree, which is nothing serious but discernible. In the final phase, the-compress Group4 option applies Group4 fax compression, a lossless method particularly efficient for bi-level images, and saves in TIFF format.
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