It's hot in Japan, and finally coming to the U.S.: For $2 or $3 per title, you can have your book collection lovingly scanned, emailed, and ground into dust. You don't even have to dispose of the corpse. Progress!

In Japan, where space comes at a premium, book scanning exploded after the launch of the Kindle and especially the iPad; by February there were reportedly up to 60 companies offering to convert physical titles into PDFs. Now the practice has come to the U.S. via a subsidiary of Bookscan, a leading Japanese conversion company. 1DollarScan.com charges $1 for every hundred book pages; the customer pays shipping herself and there's a surcharge if you want the books returned. "1DollarScan defaults to recycling your paper unless you expressively request otherwise," notes SingularityHub. "Talk about the death of print."

If you're feeling guilty the the thought of sending your books to have their spines removed and pages shredded, console yourself with the knowledge that they will end up in a better place: Inside your "revolutionary" iPad. Such a shiny little tomb.