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Gladtobemom · 03-01-2008, 08:08 PM

I've also imaged several texts tha I teach from. I took digital photographs, converted them to 4 shades of gray. (It took me 3 hours to do the photos for a Calculus book, 2 hours for Linear Algebra, and 2.5 hours for Operational Mathmatics.

DH did the rest in Microsoft Word, he set the page size, then inserted the image for each page after cropping the margins. He did a table of contents so that I can "go to" and cropped each image to maximize its viewing potential. I just view them in landscape and I can read them fine.

Then he did a "save as pdf" the pdf save tool is available free from microsoft.

DH is interjecting over my shoulder that he wrote a macro to do most of the work. It took him 9 hours for the first book (about 300 pages). The calculus book (1400 pages) took only 2 hours.

You can't imagine how liberating it is to have all my syllabus material and all my course material in Ebook format. I use a Fujitsu Tablet PC for most viewing, but I can view them in Cybook and have it with me all the time.
The big advantage of the Tablet PC is that I can do annotation and make separate notes specific to the particular class session. Even in Cybook, though, I can bookmark my spot to start the next lecture.

I soooo wish they'd do textbooks as ebooks. It would be so easy for the publishers to format them up since they have all the raw stuff. Every semester I see dumpsters full of books with their covers torn off by campus bookstore. When books change, they rip off the covers to send back to the publisher and just scrap the rest.

When I was teaching Celestial Mechanics, I was able to get an electronic version of the book from the author and that was soooo wonderful.

Oh well, if wishing were nickels we'd all be rich.

03-01-2008, 08:08 PM	#6
Gladtobemom Connoisseur Posts: 63 Karma: 10 Join Date: Feb 2008 Device: Cybook, Palm Z72	I've also imaged several texts tha I teach from. I took digital photographs, converted them to 4 shades of gray. (It took me 3 hours to do the photos for a Calculus book, 2 hours for Linear Algebra, and 2.5 hours for Operational Mathmatics. DH did the rest in Microsoft Word, he set the page size, then inserted the image for each page after cropping the margins. He did a table of contents so that I can "go to" and cropped each image to maximize its viewing potential. I just view them in landscape and I can read them fine. Then he did a "save as pdf" the pdf save tool is available free from microsoft. DH is interjecting over my shoulder that he wrote a macro to do most of the work. It took him 9 hours for the first book (about 300 pages). The calculus book (1400 pages) took only 2 hours. You can't imagine how liberating it is to have all my syllabus material and all my course material in Ebook format. I use a Fujitsu Tablet PC for most viewing, but I can view them in Cybook and have it with me all the time. The big advantage of the Tablet PC is that I can do annotation and make separate notes specific to the particular class session. Even in Cybook, though, I can bookmark my spot to start the next lecture. I soooo wish they'd do textbooks as ebooks. It would be so easy for the publishers to format them up since they have all the raw stuff. Every semester I see dumpsters full of books with their covers torn off by campus bookstore. When books change, they rip off the covers to send back to the publisher and just scrap the rest. When I was teaching Celestial Mechanics, I was able to get an electronic version of the book from the author and that was soooo wonderful. Oh well, if wishing were nickels we'd all be rich.