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Iain · 10-31-2010, 06:08 AM

I've written a long post on my experience with scanning here.
Briefly, I used FineReader 10 which cost around 60 quid ($100), a guillotine ($200) and a Fujitsu fi6130 (£600) which was the largest cost.

You have to make a few decisions. Are you prepared to destroy your books (cutting the spines off)? This allows a vastly quicker process. How important are errors to you (if you hate typos output to PDF, otherwise ePub makes sense)? How do you value your time over your spending?

On output, if you pick PDF (or PDF/A) you will get a book out in 80MB (Tiff file 1GB) which is a good copy of the original. If you get the book into ePub format then it will be 1MB. I personally don't like PDF to read - I want to be able to set the font size and reflow the book.

Finally, even with FineReader 10, the quality varies from book to book. Mainly it is very good (character errors in the 1 in 10,000 range at a guess - formatting is less good). With some books though (probably font related) it makes more or less consistent errors little -> lidle perhaps). With decorative fonts especially in chapter headings, drop caps and initial paragraph text it can get things wrong more often.

Also, if you use the 'cut the spines off approach' you will get feed errors so you need to think about how to repair or re-process books which have stuck, missing, angled or torn pages.

Iain

10-31-2010, 06:08 AM	#3
Iain Enthusiast Posts: 49 Karma: 14 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Harrogate, England Device: iPad	I've written a long post on my experience with scanning here. Briefly, I used FineReader 10 which cost around 60 quid ($100), a guillotine ($200) and a Fujitsu fi6130 (£600) which was the largest cost. You have to make a few decisions. Are you prepared to destroy your books (cutting the spines off)? This allows a vastly quicker process. How important are errors to you (if you hate typos output to PDF, otherwise ePub makes sense)? How do you value your time over your spending? On output, if you pick PDF (or PDF/A) you will get a book out in 80MB (Tiff file 1GB) which is a good copy of the original. If you get the book into ePub format then it will be 1MB. I personally don't like PDF to read - I want to be able to set the font size and reflow the book. Finally, even with FineReader 10, the quality varies from book to book. Mainly it is very good (character errors in the 1 in 10,000 range at a guess - formatting is less good). With some books though (probably font related) it makes more or less consistent errors little -> lidle perhaps). With decorative fonts especially in chapter headings, drop caps and initial paragraph text it can get things wrong more often. Also, if you use the 'cut the spines off approach' you will get feed errors so you need to think about how to repair or re-process books which have stuck, missing, angled or torn pages. Iain