This week I received my first book, “Trial and Error and the Idea of Progress,” in electronic form as a Word file. It was published in 1978 by Open Court in the USA, having formed my PhD thesis at the University of St Andrews. There were no home computers in those days, so no electronic version existed. I searched on the internet and bought via Alibris a used library copy I was prepared to sacrifice. A local copy shop guillotined it and fed the pages through an auto-feed scanner to produce a .pdf file. I outsourced to India the task of converting this to a Word file by optical character recognition software, with hand checking to remove any errors. Back came the Word file, flawless, as far as I can tell, and my book is back again in the land of the living. I will post highly summarized versions of some of its ideas here, and post the whole thing somewhere accessible to anyone interested.
Filed under: Updates |
Madsen Pirie 
Which copy shop did you use, and how much did it cost? I am considering using 1dollarscan.com to scan a book of 310 pages, but after “extras” it’s going to cost $16 instead of $4. So I might consider doing it locally if its cheaper.
Thanks
James,
Not very helpful. I had mine done by First Colour in London, England. It cost more than the price you were quoted, so my advice is simply to ask local firms if they can beat that price. Best wishes.