One business I kinda want to exist is a book warehouse/scanning operation. I send them boxes of books; they give me an app with access to digital versions of every book I send them. The whole operation is somewhere in, say, Nebraska, so storage cost is very low.

Similar scanning services exist in Japan as well (ex. [1]). The difference is that they kindly discard the books for you once getting scanned!

[1] https://www.bookscan.co.jp/

Something like this?

https://1dollarscan.com/sp/

$.01 per page and they are based in Fremont, CA.

This looks like a cheaper way to get most ebooks and you can ship the books direct from Amazon. If enough people did this, maybe ebook pricing will come down to something rational.

>maybe ebook pricing will come down to something rational.

Why don't you think it's rational? Note that the cost to print and distribute a printed book is only about $2 of its cost. Or don't you think authors, editors, etc. should be able to earn money?

I frequently see Kindle pricing as higher than print. If ebook prices were 2$ less, I'd be more inclined to buy some. If they were 50% less, I'd buy 10x more. If the author got a higher cut, I'd also be more inclined to give these middlemen my money. As it is, I buy used print books most of the time...

Book pricing can be weird at times but Kindle is usually cheaper than new print. But, yes, more than used. Though I'll often buy Kindle for fiction anyway because I don't really want physical books. (And, to be honest, I read a lot fewer books than I used to in any case. I'm definitely time/attention limited rather than money. Ebooks could be free and I wouldn't read a lot more.)

For a while there existed services that did this with your CD collection. You'd send them a crate of your music CDs and they'd send back all the music ripped as mp3s.

Obviously, they didn't re-rip music they'd already ripped so technically for popular music, you got 'someone else's' mp3s.

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My multi function laser printer has a duplex scanner on it. It can scan pages at quite a rate. The problem is not the scanning, but the accurate OCRing, and for things like magazines, the storage of all those high resolution pages. Right now, I cut out the articles I want to keep from my monthly mags, and just scan those. It seems like a fair compromise right now.

Also, in UK with our strict "fair-dealing" (as opposed to USA's Fair Use) none of this is lawful - including ripping CDs for personal use (though that format-shifting was briefly allowed for a couple of years).

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion; not legal advice.