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:

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.

Blue Leaf Book Scanning

This review first appeared on Teleread.org.

Earlier today, I read a post on Teleread.org about Blue Leaf, a company that will scan your book and send you a searchable PDF file. The service costs about 4 cents per page, plus a flat $15 fee to cover operating costs and return shipping.

I immediately wondered whether this was the answer I’ve been looking for to convert the small collection of books I have that aren’t available digitally. I’m too lazy to do all the book scanning by hand, as I suspect most readers are, so these books have remained on my To Do list for years now.

An affordable way to convert a personal library? MAYBE.

I decided to try out the service on an out-of-print book that the publisher has yet to make available as a digital file; in fact, it was never even published in the United States. I bought it from Amazon UK back in 1997, and physical copies of it now go for $50 or more on various websites. It’s listed on the Google Books site, but of course you can’t preview it or purchase it digitally there because so many authors and publishers don’t want Google to sell their books.

I deliberately picked a book that’s written in English but uses lots of accented characters and foreign names (it’s about Hungarian history), and that has photographic inserts, a bibliography, and an index. As soon as it’s returned, I’ll post a follow up about how well the service worked.

There are three things I realized as I clicked the button to proceed with the order, and I think they may impact how useful Blue Leaf can be for readers who want to convert their private libraries:

1. It’s emotionally hard to send off a physical book. I’m not a fan in any way of physical books, and yet I felt a twinge of fear as I slid my book into a padded envelope to ship to Connecticut. What if it gets lost? What if I never see it again? What if it’s returned in pieces? I know it’s irrational, but it’s what I felt.
2. I’m not sure I’m brave/foolish enough to try the service on the few books I do consider precious. I have an oral history of one of the few survivors of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978. I would love to have a digital copy, but I’m not sure I would ever be able to willingly part with my copy. Even with postal insurance, I don’t know that I’d be able to replace it if it went missing. I’ll probably have to scan this by hand myself or never do it at all.
3. It’s just too expensive to convert an entire library. To convert the <300 page book I chose, the total cost was just under $28, not counting the extra $5 or so I'll spend on shipping supplies and fees. I'm going to end up paying about $33 for a digital copy of this book. I have another one I wanted to try, but at 400 pages it became too expensive for my test. One could argue that if you value your free time at more than a few bucks an hour, Blue Leaf still works out to be far cheaper than doing it yourself. On the other hand, you can just leave those books alone and hope that someday they'll be made available in the marketplace

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve got a big pile of cash, Blue Leaf is best for special editions you just have to have in digital format.

An affordable way for authors to convert their own out-of-print works! YES.

The real beauty of the service may be for authors. David Rothman on Teleread noted that Blue Leaf offers an incredibly cheap way for individual authors to convert their own out-of-print titles into digital formats.

This could be a helluva a deal for individuals and small publishers. Talk about the potential for getting back lists into E and POD!

An average book would cost someone around $30-50 to convert into a basic PDF or Word doc that you can then adapt into various ebook formats. If you’re really anti-DIY, you can even pay Blue Leaf extra for them to create the device formats for you. (Note however that to get all the formats delivered on CD, plus an audio version using technology similar to Amazon’s text-to-speech functionality on the Kindle, you’ll be paying closer to $100.)

In fact, I hope the author of the book I’ve sent in for conversion takes note, and converts his book on his own for digital distribution. I’m sure services like Blue Leaf will continue to appear, and between those and various ebook retailers (yes, including Google Books), there’s no reason for any author’s older works to languish in “not for sell” exile.

[www.BlueLeaf-Book-Scanning.com via Teleread]

Joe Konrath’s scenario of the future, where an ebook can fluidly move across devices while being consumed in a variety of ways throughout the day, inspired me to write my own user experience scenario.

Below is a look at what kind of person might buy a personalized anthology, how a retailer might offer the service, and what it might cost. When it comes to personalized anthologies, the technology and the content already exist; it just requires some large-scale cooperation among retailers, publishers, and authors, which may take some years to work out.

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A while back, I tried to brainstorm some ways that digital books can deliver value that print simply can’t. Thriller writer Joe Konrath (also known as horror writer Jack Kilborn), has one-upped me with his recently posted “average reader scenario” set four years from now.

Imagining himself as an average reader with a $99 ebook device, Konrath tosses out idea after idea to illustrate how digital publishing can change the reader/author experience.

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Wow! I’m so behind the curve on all the release-date drama over Stephen King’s newest book, Under the Dome, which based on critical reception and fan buzz seems poised to become one of his classics alongside works like The Stand and Misery. I completely missed the news, two weeks ago, that Scribner has decided to delay the release of the ebook edition by a month in order to help drive hardcover sales. This has understandably infuriated those Kindle-owning King fans who have been primed–thanks to Scribner’s own massive marketing campaign–to jump on the book when it comes out next week, but who will now have to wait another month.

I sort of get why they did it, or at least I think I do. Scribner wants consumers to understand that the hardcover retains pride of place in the world of release dates, and if you really want a new book you’ll have to pay a premium by choosing the hardcover. They also want to send a message (to Amazon? surely not to consumers, who have no say over the matter) that the $10 price point for new releases is unacceptable.

I also think I understand why they chose King’s new novel, which is the publishing world’s equivalent to an AT-AT walker. They want to ensure that the experiment works.

But did Scribner choose the wrong battle by trying to reinforce this false hierarchy of print over digital? I think they wasted an opportunity to reset ebook pricing expectations with consumers, and they’re wasting marketing dollars too.

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