[dcalder]

If you're looking for "readable" rather than archive-quality, all you need is a decent scanner and VueScan. Heck, even "archive-quality" is do-able, as long as your original book isn't too fragile to handle being opened out flat on the scanner bed.

Using VueScan Professional and my beloved old AcerScan 610ST (with the Adaptec USBXchange SCSI-to-USB adapter), I've done a few doujinshi for scanlation projects and a few out-of-print fanzines for friends who had material published in them but couldn't afford the zine at the time (not all fanzines can afford to give free copies to contributors). A 100+ page fanzine/doujinshi scanned on the "magazine" setting ends up somewhere around 2GB as raw DNG files. Either save as more than one file-type during the scanning process or you can later point VueScan back at those DNG files and re-scan them to a multi-page TIFF or PDF. With a size-reduction setting of 3, you end up with a single file in the neighbourhood of 150+MB - averaging just over 1MB per page for text pages. I think that file with size-reduction setting of none ended up around 330+MB. Keep in mind, of course, that these are pure image PDFs, not text! VueScan can also output as JPEGs, with both the size-reduction setting and file compression setting being configurable.

VueScan can do OCR as well, so text PDFs should be possible, but I have yet to attempt it (though if I do decide to, I can work directly with the DNG files and don't need to re-scan the original). The image PDFs are more than clear enough for the purposes that they're being used for. I highly recommend that anyone who's ever cursed their scanning software take a good long look at VueScan. It's reasonably priced and infinitely better than any other scanner software that I've ever checked out. It can "scan" from disk, scanner, digital camera, etc., and can be set up to do automatic scans at regular intervals, batch scans, etc. A very useful, versatile 'tool' for anyone's software 'toolkit'.

Edit:

Just took a few minutes to toss one of the afore-mentioned scan-generated PDFs on my Cybook. Considering all the previous comments on the complete unsuitability of any ebook reader other than the iLiad for reading PDFs, I hadn't bothered before. But, in the interests of research, I thought it was worth a shot.

The book in question is 109 printed pages, mainly text but with a few drawings and comics; only a couple of pages are full-colour. The PDF file is 168MB and the Cybook handled it with ease. There was a slight delay in turning pages, but then, there's also a slight delay in paging through it on the computer (much like 90% of the PDFs I've ever viewed), so that's rather a moot point. I was able to read it in portrait mode fit to page (yes, really!) but then I run my computer monitor at a resolution that makes other people squint and reach for a magnifying glass, so... *shrug* In landscape mode, fit to width, it was perfectly readable for the average person - probably comparable to the text in the average mass market paperback. And the original of this is an 8 1/2" x 11" fanzine, with text in two columns. So, the answer to the question "is scanning a book as PDF for viewing on the Cybook possible" is definitely a resounding "yes" - at least for someone with reasonably good vision (I wear glasses for distances but not for reading and usually not for the computer monitor either).

I'd suggest, in future, that the more reasonable response to questions about PDFs in general on the Cybook be less of an immediate "no, they're not any good" because, frankly, I think that's a rather inaccurate answer and won't necessarily hold true for everyone. They're not necessarily unreadable, even if they haven't been optimized for viewing on such a small screen. If I were really planning to use this particular file on the Cybook, I'd probably run VueScan back through the raw DNG files, crop out the excess margins to improve display size, maybe play a bit with the file-size reduction settings in hopes of improving display speed, and then generate a new PDF, at which point I would probably be comfortable reading the whole thing in portrait mode.

Note: As far as scanning time goes, this particular 109 page zine took two-three hours to scan - in part because, while I was doing that on the desktop, I was playing a game and browsing the web on the laptop. Theoretically, it should be possible to get the scanning done much more quickly, if that was the only task being carried out.