[cliffsloane]

I have a question that MIGHT be big, or I just missed it in searching.

Can anyone point me towards any website, tutorial or software about converting physical books to an electronic format? I have searched widely and it seems unnecessarily difficult. The difficulty seems mostly connected to preserving hyperlinks.

I plan to hire someone with VERY limited computer skills to do the job (I have 500 books!), and the best I have been able to find is this set of procedures:

1. Scan each page using OCR
2. Copy the text, each page at a time, until a chapter is scanned..
3. Save each chapter separately and save as either RTF or TXT.
4. Save TOC separately.
5. Open a new DOC (or DOCX) and insert the text files one at a time.
6. Begin with TOC, and bookmark each chapter heading (first step in creating hyperlinks).
7. With each new chapter inserted, create the hyperlink.
8. Convert the whole document to an ebook format.

This seems WAY more tedious than I thought it might be. Is there a magic bit of software that I am missing?

What will I do, then, when I get to the academic books, with footnotes, bibliography and all that?