$scanning

[sixtysix]

A neighbour of mine on hearing I was interested in book scanning asked would I scan a book he had borrowed, which was a local history thesis. The book contained 9 fold out maps. Anyway I scanned the book for him but suggested he get the maps copied in a local shop which specializes in architectural drawings etc. They scanned the maps gave him 4 hard copies of each and also converted them to pdf and gave him a cd with the scanned images. They charged him 105 euro or $144.
I scanned the book-175 pages for free.
There is an income in this project somewhere.
Having looked at the pdf of the maps I could have done it myself.

[StevePoling]

The ultimate service would be to hand someone a volume plus cash and get back an ebook in, say, ePub format. However, this is potentially an infinite-capacity time-sync, b/c the OCR process is not going to be 100% and it won't organize the text it recognizes into a tidy book format complete with sections and chapters. And then there are the considerations of "book design" to make the final product pretty.

I can see this as a labor of love, but not a commercial endeavor.

Perhaps you should identify something that creates value with minimum labor content. Perhaps a service to just image the pages of a customer's book. Greater value will be predicated upon greater aesthetic quality and OCR accuracy. My scanner works, but I'm learning now one must tweak it to get highest performance. Thus, your value equation include the tweaks you've done that the next guy hasn't. E.g.
1) sharp focus
2) no keystoning
3) high image contrast
4) one page per image (e.g. no splitting needed)
5) all lines horizontal
With ruthless attention to detail you can develop a process that does all the above in setup.

Your costs will be based on how much you spend in setup and then per page. Your pricing should reflect the value received by your customer. The difference is this thing called gross profit.

[Antoha-spb]

There's a plenty of consumer grade flatbed scanners priced US$50 and up that can help you scanning up to a4/legal format. There are numerous DIY builds that capture up to A3-sized dox. But wide format scanners start at some $5K, not being in fact that complicated sort of devices for mass production. However, none has made a workable diy replica so far...and so unfortunately.

In Saint Petersburg making a wide format (A1, A0) scan costs from US$10 for a simple BW drawing at low res, and up to US$50 for hi-res colour things. Xeroxing an a4/Letter page costs some 3-10 US cents, while scanning same a4/letter page - about a dollar %))

No surprise that global economy has gone into hell