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While mass scanning and converting documents into digital files isn’t a new idea, we’re seeing companies employ various innovative approaches that differentiate them from their competitors. Scanandgo in the UK process shoe boxes of customers photos, and now 1dollarscan.com in the US offer a scanning service for documents, books, business cards and photos using a low-cost model, with orders starting from USD 1. 1dollarscan.com is operated by zLibro, Inc., a subsidiary of Bookscan Japan, featured on Springwise earlier this year. Their aim is to “help people, small businesses, students, researchers and the general public digitize, preserve, archive, and access existing content as digital”. For USD 1 the service will scan ten photos, business cards, document pages, or 100 book pages. The process is simple; firstly customers order, pay and send their documents to 1dollarscan.com. Once they are digitized — as a PDF file or DVD — documents, with the exception of books, are returned to the customer at a cost of USD 5 plus shipping fee. PDFs will contain an OCR — Optical Character Recognition — text layer behind images to make them searchable and selectable. 1dollarscan.com have plans to launch a membership model, with “premium” and “platinum” monthly subscription packages in the pipeline. By investing in premium technology to deliver quality service at high speed and low cost, Bookscan became leaders in their field within the first year. Will 1dollarscan.com reap similar rewards with this model? Spotted by: Murtaza Patel