1dollarscan Launches in U.S. to Help Customers Clear Shelf Space while Keeping Favorite Books

Want to digitize your home library or versions of books not yet available for your tablet or e-reader? 1dollarscan provides a solution starting at $1. Launched on August 5, 1dollarscan is the U.S. service of Bookscan, a Japanese company helping consumers digitize paper books. The service can also be used for scanning documents, business cards, greeting cards and photos.

	Hiroshi Nakano, president of zLibro, the company operating 1dollarscan, at office in San Jose

Bookscan was started April 2010, just before the iPad's release in Japan the following month, and shot to popularity one week later after a well known technology celebrity tweeted about the service, said Hiroshi Nakano, President of zLibro, the company operating 1dollarscan. The company's service preserves any margin notes and highlighting made in the original books or documents and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which inserts a text layer behind the scanned images to make text searchable and selectable. Bookscan also employs its patent-pending technology that formats each book or document for different devices to optimize the reader's experience. After just over a year, Bookscan is already profitable and employs 200 employees to fulfill orders of customers on a wait list that has grown to four months long. The company seeks to repeat this success globally, starting with the U.S.

1dollarscan is currently based in San Jose, Calif. at the JETRO Business Innovation Center (BIC), a facility that helps Japanese startups enter the U.S. market. On the same day as its launch, 1dollarscan presented at the Tanabata Pitch Competition, organized by Sunbridge, co-founders of salesforce.com Japan and Oracle Japan. Buoyed by feature articles from Bloomberg, Businessweek, Wired, Forbes and TechCrunch, 1dollarscan is already busy at work processing U.S. orders.

How can they do all this starting at just $1? The company employs a similar process to Toyota's famous kaizen method, says Mr. Nakano, leveraging every efficiency they can incorporate into their process. Be sure to get your books digitized before the U.S. wait list becomes as long as Japan's, at http://1dollarscan.com.