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

anamardoll · 02-17-2012, 09:42 AM

Krystl, I'm a platinum member, so I am getting the OCR'd PDFs, but I've used both OCR and non-OCR with Fine Reader and I don't think there's a difference -- the program doesn't seem to pull or rely on the OCR data, at least as far as I can tell.

I load PDFs into Fine Reader, eyeball the conversion results (it underlines things it's not sure about), fix the one or two errors, save as an HTML document (which strips off both the margins AND the header/footer stuff that has page numbers and book title repeated each page -- very convenient).

Then I load the HTML document into Sigil. It's all one page at that point, so I go through and do Ctrl+Enter at each chapter break (Sigil keyboard shortcut for breaking everything up). Then I slap in TOC tags for each page, save as epub, and voila!

Takes a little less than an hour for a 30 chapter book. Less time for smaller books.

I think the Fine Reader program is $170, but they have sales from time to time.

http://buy.abbyyusa.com/content/frpro/default.aspx

ETA: If you're just starting out, my advice would be to fill up a flat rate shipping box (cheap shipping = savings) and sent it to 1DollarScan for the no frills conversion -- just PDFs, no OCR, no naming the files, no anything. Just $1 per page. It'll take about 30 days for them to get the files to you, but if you're willing to wait it's a great bargain.

I only joined the Platinum program because I was sending them $100 worth of books ANYWAY so I might as well get the faster service and named files.

02-17-2012, 09:42 AM	#133
anamardoll Chasing Butterflies Posts: 3,132 Karma: 5074169 Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: American Southwest Device: Uses batteries.	Krystl, I'm a platinum member, so I am getting the OCR'd PDFs, but I've used both OCR and non-OCR with Fine Reader and I don't think there's a difference -- the program doesn't seem to pull or rely on the OCR data, at least as far as I can tell. I load PDFs into Fine Reader, eyeball the conversion results (it underlines things it's not sure about), fix the one or two errors, save as an HTML document (which strips off both the margins AND the header/footer stuff that has page numbers and book title repeated each page -- very convenient). Then I load the HTML document into Sigil. It's all one page at that point, so I go through and do Ctrl+Enter at each chapter break (Sigil keyboard shortcut for breaking everything up). Then I slap in TOC tags for each page, save as epub, and voila! Takes a little less than an hour for a 30 chapter book. Less time for smaller books. I think the Fine Reader program is $170, but they have sales from time to time. http://buy.abbyyusa.com/content/frpro/default.aspx ETA: If you're just starting out, my advice would be to fill up a flat rate shipping box (cheap shipping = savings) and sent it to 1DollarScan for the no frills conversion -- just PDFs, no OCR, no naming the files, no anything. Just $1 per page. It'll take about 30 days for them to get the files to you, but if you're willing to wait it's a great bargain. I only joined the Platinum program because I was sending them $100 worth of books ANYWAY so I might as well get the faster service and named files. Last edited by anamardoll; 02-17-2012 at 09:45 AM.