Blue Leaf Book Scanning Service (www.blueleaf-book-scanning.com) is a small Connecticut company that offers a mail-in scanning service for about 10.5 cents a page. Earlier this month, David Rothman at Teleread.org wondered whether it could serve as a viable solution for those with out of print or otherwise non-digital books, so I decided to try it out and document the experience.
To test it, I shipped an out-of-print book from my library and paid for only the most basic, nondestructive scanning service. (You can drop the per page cost to 8 cents if you don’t ask for the book back.) Davide Bianchini, the co-founder of Blue Leaf, says that they use a custom built overhead photo-based scanner, as well as an industrial page-fed scanner for the cheaper, book-gets-destroyed option.
After ordering it and paying via PayPal, I bought a padded envelope and shipped the book via media mail. Eight days later I received an email with a link where I could download the files, and two days after that the physical copy of the book was back in my possession via USPS Priority Mail.
As for cost, I spent just under $29, including shipping, for one 288-page hardcover. That should make it clear that the service isn’t being positioned as an alternative to buying e-books from publishers; it seems more suitable to the rare or out of print titles in your library (or for authors with out of print books they’d like to sell digitally–more on that below).
You should also know that Blue Leaf raised its prices since Teleread’s first mention. The base fee is now $17.95, and the per page fee is 5 cents. If I repeated this experiment today, the total cost would be $33.91.
The company offers a menu of additional-fee services: if you want a text-to-speech file, a Kindle-ready file, or a backup on disc, you can buy it separately. To provide these additional services, the company maintains backups of the original scans for at least six months. If you’re not keen on the company keeping a backup copy, you might want to check first; Bianchini says that they “usually comply” with archival opt-out requests.
As far as quality goes, you can see for yourself. Below are portions of two pages from the PDF file Blue Leaf sent to me. The book I sent included photos and maps, so I’ve included one of those pages as well. (Although this is in greyscale, color scanning is offered).
Click the images to view full-size.
And here are the results of the OCR process.
You can see that mixed language texts are problematic for Blue Leaf’s OCR software. Bianchini says the software can recognize 186 different languages, but it has problems if you combine them. The usual suspects cause trouble–things like diphthongs and accented vowels. Bianchini says that they’re looking into improvements to the OCR engine, but for now you can expect good results with single-language texts, and not so good results with the random foreign word or character.
Skewing remains a problem, although this certainly isn’t unique to Blue Leaf. I found one page within the file that was unreadable because it was so distorted, so I contacted customer service and asked them to investigate. I was concerned that I’d have to send the book back for re-scanning, but they were able to correct the problematic page using their archival copy and return a corrected file in less than 24 hours.
Before going this route you should be aware of two other things:
2. You can’t monitor the scan and request a do-over on problem pages as they happen. By the time I found the illegible page, the hardcover was already back in my possession. Fortunately the problem wasn’t with the original scan, so Blue Leaf was able to fix it immediately. I can imagine there will be rare instances where you’ll have to send the book back again.
And finally, if you’re an author with out of print books that you want to convert into a print on demand template, Blue Leaf offers a “publisher ready” service for $16. That gets you a formatted and cleaned up PDF file with standardized margins, embedded fonts, and other adjustments required by POD services like Lulu.com. However, it won’t correct “processing artifacts such as page skew,” notes Bianchini. I didn’t test the service.
This review first appeared on Teleread.org.
By k wolf February 8, 2011 - 11:30 PM
Thanks! You brought up some very good points, most notably about errors that might occur in the scanning process. Thank you for taking the time to write this review- I wanted to take the time to thank you!
I have attempted to scan a 1000+ page book that I purchased for a class on one of the University’s overhead book scanners, but was unimpressed with the result- Adobe Acrobat Pro and any tool I tried to apply to the scanned-in PDF were unable to acceptably deskew and provide a useful OCR result. Not to mention, they were neither fast, nor free. I spent close to 2.5 hours physically scanning the book, processing the PDF in Acrobat, and transferring to my e-book reader. Not worth it! I would, however, consider this service (now that I know its legit, heh) in the future if I feel that the $$ is worth the reduction in backpack weight
By Chris Walters February 9, 2011 - 12:30 AM
@k wolf, You’re welcome! The one other detail I think you should know is the resulting PDF file is quite huge — 750MB in the case of my test book.
Since the OCR Word doc they provided was mostly useless, owing to the mixed language issue I described in the review, I have to rely on the PDF, and it’s really too big to use in its current state. Some day I’ll have to resize it to something more useful I guess. If you plan on using the PDF directly, you might have to do the same thing.
By Diane Fallon July 19, 2011 - 9:27 PM
Impossible to reach them. No phone number. I had books scanned and put into a kindle format and there are errors that need to be corrected, but I can’t correct them. I need to talk to a live person or even get an email, bust so far, nothing.
By Jeff Hdoges October 12, 2011 - 12:13 PM
Absolutely no customer support. I am not sure if the original post from K Wolf is a spoof or not.. So far my money is gone and nothing has been return. This service looked promising as the website was well done but we should have been leery of the fact that there was no contact info other than email.
By Blue Leaf November 22, 2011 - 2:33 PM
Hello from Blue Leaf,
and thank you for posting this review. A customer of ours had recently brought these comments to our attention; that some people are finding it difficult to get in contact with us. Please be assured that we respond to **every** email that is sent to us, usually with 48-72 hours (it has been somewhat of a busy season, but we will try to be more prompt in the future). If you have not gotten a response from us within 3 days after filling out our contact form, then it is possible that our email has been blocked by your domain or delivered to your SPAM inbox. SPAM filters have been getting very strict lately, and so we would ask that you please add our email to your allow/exceptions list. Also, in the event that you may be having problems using our contact form, we will be posting our email address on the same page as well, so you can email us directly instead of going through the form.
Another option of course would be to add a customer service phone number. But we would also have to raise our prices to cover the overhead involved with manning the lines. It is an option that we have considered, and could employ, if our customers are willing to pay more.
Blue Leaf Book Scanning.
By Blue Leaf November 23, 2011 - 8:03 AM
We just wanted to post a brief update for our customers:
We have now added a direct link to our email address on our contact page (in case there is an issue with the contact form). We have also changed our primary email contact to a GMAIL account, which should be safer for SPAM filters. We hope that these measures will insure that our customers are able to get in contact with us, and we to them, without any problems. We are also targeting an email response time to less than 24 hours.