Dick Eastman posted about a service that scans 100 pages of a book for $1.00. Anyone tried this? His blog post is here: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2011/08/scan-and-digitize-your-books-for-1-each.html
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Posted 9 months ago #
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How on earth can they afford to do it for that price? Are the workers being paid a proper wage???
I'd be so interested to know whether this is for real!
Posted 9 months ago # -
I've read a little about how google does it. They employee several shifts of minimum wage workers who do nothing but scan books all day, and who operate separate from the majority of the company's white collar workers. If you think about it, it would only take a few minutes to scan 100 pages on industrial equipment so you could easily turn a profit paying US minimum wage.
Remember, this equipment is largely automated except for loading the books - these people aren't scanning two pages at a time on $200 flatbed scanners...
Posted 9 months ago # -
I guess so - I was extrapolating from the time and effort involved in scanning on my three-in-one printer/scanner/copier!
Posted 9 months ago # -
we have bookscanners at university, i think they are about 30 years old. you open a book, as you would read it, place it under the provided cam, press a button, and so scan/ take. picture of the 2 pages. turn the page, press the button, turn the page, press the button... even if these scanners are oldoldold, they are quick. if you imagine these type of machines and a new technique... they will earn a lot of money with that service... but i envy you for those scan-services, i dont even want to kow how many years of my life i spend in boring surrounding, and turn he page, press the button... ;)
Posted 9 months ago # -
LOL Mimi, I spent a year of graduate school at a part-time job making about $5/hour doing just that (only I was photocopying not scanning). We had several machines so we bored students would race to see who could copy the fastest. :)
Posted 9 months ago # -
oh my gawd Mimi, we did NOT have that stuff where I went to uni - and I graduated under half a decade ago!! It was a top 5 UK university too! I'm so, so freaking jealous, especially as getting books was a CONSTANT struggle - you were lucky if you managed to get your hands on a third of the entires on any reading list, no matter how early you showed up. Eventually I cottoned on to the fact that a number of people neither checked out the books nor photocopied/consulted them in situ: instead, they actually *hid* the volumes - as in, moved them from their proper place to a different shelf in the library and noted that down. That was really maddening because the book still showed up as available on the online library catalog, so you set off from your off-campus digs looking forward to a good haul, only to discover the vast majority of what you need is MIA and you'd just wasted a good two hours of study time.
All we had was photocopiers, and we paid for those copies, by the page - good money, too: twice as much as the public library despite the fact the library was in one of the more affluent areas in town, close to most of the private schools. A scanning service would have helped I think, at least if they charged a flat fee for the use rather than by the page. Which let's face it they would have been able to do as all they had to do was figure out the cost of maintaining the machines and then divvy it up by the total of users - it's not like scanners have a lot of consumables whose frequency of replacement depends on the amount of use like photocopiers have paper, toner, whatever.
Grrr, I can still go on about the library situation. I really hope it's not like that where you are Mimi, but sadly I've heard this kind of story from other recent graduates :-/
Posted 9 months ago # -
the sooner every-single-thing is available as an e-book, the better off we'll all be!
many years ago, i had an entire huge page coffee-table book photocopied and hardback-bound at an overnight copy place behind the university in denpasar, bali.
it cost me $10 and it is still going strong today....it has been loaned out and referred to many times.
there were a string of these places, obviously set up to copy textbooks....simple three-sided concrete boxes with a roller door as the fourth wall, containing a photocopy machine, a fluorescent strip light, a table, a cash box, and a couple of young balinese guys.Posted 9 months ago # -
mili - you're so right about the book-hiding. I was at university in the UK 2007-2009 and living a good hour away. Like you it annoyed me beyond belief how often it happened that the 'available' books had been neatly hidden away by people who didn't think the rules of fairness applied to them.
That and paying other people to write their essays....
Posted 9 months ago # -
julia -
it's always nice to see someone understand! Honestly sometimes (especially when overworked or pressed for time) you begin to think you hallucinated the listing or something!! lol. The worse was when I was, ahem, informed of the practice - in the most casual voice ever, IF you please, like 'oh yes, didn't you know?' I'd suspected, but that was another thing. What about you, how did you figure it out - did you catch somebody at it or something? lol
I believe there was even a way of 'tricking' the automatic checkout machines into thinking you'd checked out the book, so that it wouldn't set off the alarms when going through the metal detector gates at the entrance of the library, but without actually having it credited to your account, thus letting you keep more than your undergrad's allowance. So the book went walkies in somebody's backpack and whether it ever went home again was thus entirely up to their goodwill and honesty -and obviously if they were pulling tricks like that, these qualities come rather into question in the first place!
*growl*
I was never made aware of paid essay writing in any way as direct as book-hiding, but I'm pretty sure it was going on. The irony is they really did our heads in about plagiarism (heck of an obsession they had about that - I think they counted the number of citations more than they actually worried about the content honestly), and as a result of that abiding worry primary work in general and field-work in particular was silently but quite actively discouraged - rather unfortunate for any discipline, but pretty dismal in archaeology! I know this is pretty off-topic now, but what line of study were you in Julia if you don't mind saying?
Posted 9 months ago # -
have you seen the last post on this page? http://unclutterer.com/discuss/topic/small-printer-scanner-for-a-transient-lifestyle even though i don´t like business-related posts in this forum- this seems to be one of the scanners that i thought of, the old thingy from the library combined with new technology. and you don´t even have to press a button, wow!
Posted 9 months ago #
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