I hope innovations like this could reduce the price of book scanning. I recently used a book service in San Jose to scan all my books: http://1dollarscan.com. It was good experience, with good support, but a bit pricey with their extras.
Sounds great until you look more closely. Here's the plan:
1) Gather up all your treasured books and send them to us
2) We'll make scans of them
3) We'll then grind your favorite books into compost, so you can Save The Planet! Yay!
$1500 Google design I still have to build myself that only damages 45% of my books? No, thanks.
Scanning service that only charges me 1$/book to destroy my books for me? No, thanks.
It depends on the circumstances. This service is brilliant for people outside of the US who are interested in books published in the US. You can send books directly from Amazon,com or from one of the used sellers. Therefore you only pay regular postage and find most of the time used versions of a book (which not always ship international).
When I was in Europe, I would have paid $15 for the only available used version of a book on the local Amazon, with 1dollarscan I payed $1 book + $3 shipping + $2 for the scan.
I think you're being overly critical of the Googler's design. It's only a prototype after all. I think it's more like a proof of concept at this point - that you can have your own book scanner that is much cheaper than professional versions.
So even though for me it was a one-shot deal, I had plenty of time (I was moving) and it made sense for me to get their 'Platinum Membership' which includes many of the extras -- for a few months - which covers 100 sets for free each month. Still it was definitely expensive - more than I'd like. The end result were high quality (but definitely large) pdfs. I could use their "fine tune" services to optimize for different platforms / compress, too, but for me that meant additional storage / time if I kept the originals, so I didn't use it much. In the end I spent a lot of money, but now have copies of my books -- which I didn't have to ship long-distance and which I don't have to physically store now. I'm more-or-less happy-ish.
