Author here — the image quality was comparable, if not better, which is understandable because both use pretty standard commercial scanners. An upside is that instead of cutting the binder as 1DollarScan does, they tore the pages from the seam, so the pages remained whole. They didn’t do any compression either.

There a lotz of books without digital version, or it's region locked or the seller won't ship to your location.

You’re correct, but they were found not to be infringing because the courts said it was non commercial fair use, under this reasoning (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/business/media/googles-di...):

> “The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals,” Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote, explaining the court’s decision.

This is a dissimilar situation. The books are being scanned for personal use, the whole book is viewable, and money is changing hands. The best argument for fair use might be that the customer still has to buy a copy of the physical book, so the digital copy service isn’t necessarily eating away at the book publishers sales — though, the fact that they bought used undercuts that a little.

That’s correct; I somehow messed up that paragraph during editing. Thanks for pointing it out.