Scanning a book is a tedious process, and I haven’t completed the scanning of very many books. One online service promises to do the job at a modest price: one dollar per 100 pages. The same service will also scan documents, photographs, business cards, and even the old greeting cards from relatives that I have been saving all these years.

1DollarScan has been in business for a few years and has a good reputation. Anyone can use 1DollarScan by filling out an online order form and then shipping the books or other materials to 1DollarScan’s offices in San Jose, California. The company scans them and converts them into PDF files and also (optionally) performs OCR (optical character recognition) to create a text layer behind the images, which makes the text searchable and selectable. The PDF files and text files can be sent to the customer by download or on DVD disks.

After 1DollarScan has scanned the materials and returned the electronic images to the customer, the original paper documents may either be returned (the customer pays the shipping charges) or sent to a recycling service to be shredded and reborn as recycled paper. Obviously, none of us will be sending family heirloom photos to be recycled! For me, this is a great method of recycling all the less-valuable books and magazines I have accumulated over the years. I bet I have 200 pounds of them, and I certainly can’t keep them all when I downsize my living space.

One question that pops to mind is, “What about legalities?” Indeed, the folks at 1DollarScan have examined the issue closely and have obtained legal advice. The company’s managers seem confident that the conversion service does qualify as “fair use” although others, including the Author’s Guild, disagree. The Author’s Guild position is outlined in an article in Publishers Weekly at http://goo.gl/XHOvXr. The attorney for 1DollarScan also is quoted at the end of the same article. The 1DollarScan attorney’s position is that making a backup for personal use is a classic fair use of a work you own, similar backing up your CDs to play later on your MP3 music player. The concept of converting music CDs you already own to another format has already been tested in court and has always been deemed to be legal, at least in the United States.

In short, 1DollarScan does not make copies. Instead, it makes conversions. The customer gives up the original book in order to obtain a PDF version. I am not an attorney, so I cannot guess at the complex legal issues involved. However, I suspect it will be difficult to convince most judges that 1DollarScan is committing copyright infringement by converting a customer’s books and documents from one format to another. It should be interesting to watch this issue if it ever does wind its way through the courts.