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.

Everyone who writes or publishes wants to know how to use Twitter as a promotional tool to drive sales, and to that end the British book reading website Lovereading–sort of the ugly UK cousin to Goodreads, only with a smaller membership and more directly tied to big publishing houses–just completed a survey of members to ask them about Twitter. The results weren’t favorable to Twitter as an effective recommendation source or promotional tool, with The Bookseller going so far as to write, “The book-buying public may be largely immune to suggestions from Twitter, Facebook and other sites.”

Uh oh.

But wait! Before you dismiss Twitter as an also-ran in marketing, check out who Lovereading surveyed compared to who uses Twitter the most. As with all online communities, the only way to successfully connect is to figure out what kind of person participates in Twitter, and how he uses the service.

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Last week, the BBC Radio 4 program Open Book focused on the role of the editor in publishing a work. Host Mariella Frostrup interviewed five editors or author-editor combos about what value an editor–whose job didn’t really formally exist until after World War II–provides.

You can listen to the half-hour show here; the first 10 minutes alone are worth it just to hear Diana Athill talk about the unique editing requirements of Updike, Naipul, and Rhys. But here’s a summary of key points from the full episode:

• An editor can help shore up a writer’s weaknesses. Some writers may be masters of language, but need help shaping something into a finished work. Other writers may be great writers but lousy at taking care of other essential life tasks, so they would otherwise never write or publish without someone’s help.
• An editor is a guaranteed, and perhaps the only, extremely attentive reader a writer will have. Diana Athill says, “What one learns when you’re working with an eidtor, is that actually very few peole get their books read extremely attentively by anybody. A writer is dying to have his or her work read with complete attention. And here is this editor person, and the one thing they have done is they have paid full attention to your work, which is very gratifying.”
• An editor may act more like an agent or a music producer. Some editors will work closely with writers to help them determine career steps, going so far as to advise on what sort of book to write next. Others, like Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish, will manipulate the original manuscript so much that their role becomes something more collaborative, or even borderline Svengali-like, as with music producers.

Open Book for Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 [BBC]
(Photo: Nic’s events)

Here’s a guy who’s bypassed both vanity-presses and mainstream publishers by getting readers to pitch in and pay him directly for a book before he’s even written published it. Call it a reader-funded advance.

Robin Sloan is a blogger who previously published a short story, Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store, on the Kindle (you can buy it here for 99 cents). I stumbled across him on Kickstarter, a website where people can post ideas for projects and ask others around the world to sponsor them.

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Cory Doctorow, the sci-fi author and ebook pioneer (at least when it comes to DRM and pricing), announced this month in his new Publishers Weekly column that he’s about to embark on a bold publishing experiment. He says he’s going to publish his next book on his own, or at least without a publisher’s help, as he’ll be calling in favors from professionals to help with artwork, editing, and printing. He’s going to use all the unconventional distribution formats he’s now familiar with, and he’s going to make a profit.

Best of all for the rest of us, he says he will document the process and share the results, which means any writer or publisher curious about digital distribution will be able to benefit from whatever happens. I’m rooting for ya, Doctorow.

I also think it might be interesting to look at this experiment in the context of three other online distribution experiments.

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