How much does it cost to have a book digitized?

From ScenarioThinking
Jump to navigation Jump to search

1800 pages an hour, $6500,- hour, about 1400 dollars for a 400 page book, not including the $150.000 machine cost
http://www.kcoyle.net/jal-32-6.html

The cost of scanning books:
The Million Books Project in China cost around $6/book.
Google’s library project I estimate to cost well below $10/book, maybe as low as $5/book.
The Internet Archive scans books at a cost of 10 cents/page or $30/book. It is more expensive but you get superior quality–I may be biased, but check it out–and that cost also covers periodically reprocessing the books based on new techniques and technologies as well as perpetual storage.
All of these projects produce page images for reading, optical character recognition for searching, and access formats like pdf and on-screen viewing. (see www.opencontentalliance.org)