MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - New trend? digitize your books for $1USD each.

rainsparade · 05-30-2012, 12:21 AM

Hi, sorry to bump an old thread but I was wondering if anyone has used the FineTune service from 1dollarscan.com? http://1dollarscan.com/finetune.php

I was really impressed with the Kindle FuneTune especially as it comes out so much clearer on a Kindle than a regular PDF.

I recently got a bunch of books done through them for the purpose of reading on a Kindle Touch and eventually on an iPad. The quality of the pdfs they've scanned them to is excellent but one thing strikes me as odd:

Normally when you get a book done through them (and pay an extra $1 per set) you get an OCR'ed pdf, however when they FineTune it the OCR isn't there anymore. So you can either get a nice searchable pdf (you can also pay $2 for the high quality OCR option) or a FineTuned pdf but seemingly not both.

My question is: Does anyone know the program they use when they FineTune? I know how to crop the edges (briss) and reduce the size (adobe) but not how to optimize it for Kindle (Resolution optimization, character optimization, dot-by-dot display).

I've tried saving the pdf as black and white but it doesn't make much of a difference. I've also tried using ABBYY finereader to OCR the FineTune'd pdf with horrible results (it looks fine on the computer, and the OCR might even be better than 1dollarscan's but when read on a Kindle there are missing letters etc, which is strange as I thought the pdf was still an image).

I'm also a little puzzled how the compressed the pdf that much (250MB original file from a 500 page book -> 24MB with FineTune, the most I could compress it was to 75MB).

Sorry for the wall of text and congratulations if you've managed to read this far. I just wanted to be as clear as possible.

Thanks.

05-30-2012, 12:21 AM	#173
rainsparade Junior Member Posts: 4 Karma: 500192 Join Date: May 2012 Device: Kindle Touch	Hi, sorry to bump an old thread but I was wondering if anyone has used the FineTune service from 1dollarscan.com? http://1dollarscan.com/finetune.php I was really impressed with the Kindle FuneTune especially as it comes out so much clearer on a Kindle than a regular PDF. I recently got a bunch of books done through them for the purpose of reading on a Kindle Touch and eventually on an iPad. The quality of the pdfs they've scanned them to is excellent but one thing strikes me as odd: Normally when you get a book done through them (and pay an extra $1 per set) you get an OCR'ed pdf, however when they FineTune it the OCR isn't there anymore. So you can either get a nice searchable pdf (you can also pay $2 for the high quality OCR option) or a FineTuned pdf but seemingly not both. My question is: Does anyone know the program they use when they FineTune? I know how to crop the edges (briss) and reduce the size (adobe) but not how to optimize it for Kindle (Resolution optimization, character optimization, dot-by-dot display). I've tried saving the pdf as black and white but it doesn't make much of a difference. I've also tried using ABBYY finereader to OCR the FineTune'd pdf with horrible results (it looks fine on the computer, and the OCR might even be better than 1dollarscan's but when read on a Kindle there are missing letters etc, which is strange as I thought the pdf was still an image). I'm also a little puzzled how the compressed the pdf that much (250MB original file from a 500 page book -> 24MB with FineTune, the most I could compress it was to 75MB). Sorry for the wall of text and congratulations if you've managed to read this far. I just wanted to be as clear as possible. Thanks. Attached Thumbnails Last edited by rainsparade; 06-16-2012 at 11:33 PM.