There are services where I could send my entire CD collection to have it ripped to high quality MP3 (had I not already done it myself). There are places I can go to get my DVD collection digitized, and that, I might well consider, at least for the films and TV I like to rewatch. It’d cost me a few hundred quid, but the time to rip a DVD to .avi is significantly higher, and requires more manual intervention and computer power than CD ripping, so I might justify the cost as a time and effort saver. Unless, of course, someone here can point in the direction of a one-click app for OS X that makes turning a DVD to an .avi a matter of sticking the disk in and hitting go – must be able to cope with turning multi-episode TV DVD into separate files.

But I digress from my point, which is that the though occurs: why is there not a place where I can send my books, and get them delivered to me as ebook editions? I would pay pretty reasonable sums for that service – a couple of quid a book, certainly. The technology exists to do it for libraries, etc. Why not is there not a consumer level version of the service yet? I have shelf after shelf, groaning with books, cluttering the place up, making my life look untidy. They would almost certainly all fit on the memory stick I have on my keyring (based on 1-2 MB per book as a PDF for the same of argument – I don’t think I own more than 200 books, so frankly, my entire library would be a drop in the bucket). This would be almost infinitely more convenient.

I accept that not everyone is as happy reading on screen as I am (honestly, I do more reading on screen that I do on paper, these days) but surely there must be more people than just me that would have a use for the service?