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Old 08-14-2006, 03:59 PM   #2
ath
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Malmo, Sweden
Device: iLiad, Sony PRS-505, Kindle Paperwhite & Oasis
I'm not sure I found the question in here -- it mostly seemed to be a set of conditions.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
Let me ask about a topic that I think a lot of ebook fans are curious about, but I'm not sure anyone has a good answer for...
You can't have both easy and fast and cheap, I don't think.

If you want it very easy, go to a scanning bureau (fast, but not necessarily cheap). Or buy a good sheet-fed scanner ... but the good and fast ones are rarely cheap.

If you want it cheap, it's going to be a lot of work (cut up the book, scan page by page in cheapest scanner you find -- if book is small enough to fit on the scanning platen, cutting may not be necessary.) Page feeder is an option, but I don't trust the cheap ones: they tend to either crash the paper, or misfeed. And cheap scanning software tends to be a serious pain.

I've done hand scanning (HP IIP & 3C), cheap sheet feed (HP 5550C -- not recommended for large jobs, particularly not needing sheet feeding), and somewhat more expensive sheet feed (Fujitsu fi-4120). I still do hand scanning from time to time.

If you don't want to cut up the book or otherwise mistreat it, and still use a flatbed scanner, forget it. Hand-scanning it will stress the binding so much that you will probably damage the book in one way or another. The only way to do this is by using an overhead scanner, but they tend to be quite expensive.

There have been some tests with using digital cameras as scanning devices. That is a kind of improvised overhead scanner -- see http://runeberg.org/admin/camera.html . However, for best results you probably need to do single page images, rather than page spreads.

Oh, wait ... I forgot. There's actually one more way. Try http://www.archive.org/ Someone may have done the job already. Just grab the page images, and feed them to whatever program will create the final document. Some works have already been OCR'd.

If you don't particularly want page images, but only want the text in reasonably good shape, also try looking for it at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ . They also have pages with lots of copyright-related information.

Last edited by ath; 08-14-2006 at 04:04 PM.
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