1DollarScan Improves Its Book Digitization Service With Fine Tune and Dropbox

1DollarScan — the service that offers to digitize books and documents for as little as, yes, $1 — is now promising an improved experience through a service called Fine Tune.

The company is an affiliate of Bookscan Japan, and it launched last August with the goal of bringing the Bookscan service to the U.S. market. Users send their books, documents, photos, and other printed material to the 1DollarScan office, which then handles the scan process. For a price of $1 per “set” (for books, one set means 100 pages; for documents, it’s 10), you get a PDF that you can read on your smartphone or tablet. Don’t send any physical copies that you’re particularly attached to, however, because books will have their spines removed for scanning, and all of the printed materials will be recycled two weeks after the scan.

With Fine Tune, 1DollarScan says it isn’t just delivering the same PDF to every platform. Instead, it’s customizing the the files for viewing on different devices. On iPhones, for example, 1DollarScan says that Fine Tune removes the page’s margins, compresses the file, optimizes the resolution and characters. You can see a comparison of a Fine Tuned scan with a normal PDF above.

CEO Hiroshi Nakano says this approach is particularly important for making inroads in the U.S. — saving physical space is less important here than in Japan, so the main advantage of digitization is mobility. And with Fine Tune, 1DollarScan can deliver a better mobile experience.

1DollarScan offers an iPhone and iPad app, but of course PDFs are viewable on a wide range of mobile devices. To make access on all those devices even easier, the company has also announced that for platinum members (who pay $99.99 per month for 100 sets), the documents will also be automatically uploaded to their Dropbox accounts.