Archiving books (and magazines) - best way?

CallOfCth'reader · 03-08-2011, 03:46 PM

I've got a lot of old paper books which I don't want to keep (mainly for space reasons), but I'd love to have them in electronic format. Unfortunately, I've yet to find any of them in digital print. The only option open to me, for the moment at least, is to archive them myself. The ultimate aim, when I get round to it, is to convert the archived books to LRF and/or EPUB format.

What is the best way to initially archive them, for when I (eventually, maybe) convert them to LRF/EPUB in the future? I'm thinking scan the pages, and then stitch them up into a PDF file. I've read that PDF's aren't good to OCR from though, so what are my options? Save each page as a JPG?

A lot of the books are 20-40 years old, and the magazines about 20+ years old, so the pages are various shades of...um...sepia. When I save the page scans, do I just save them 'as is' and do contrast tweaking when I eventually OCR them?

pholy · 03-08-2011, 04:08 PM

My Opticbook3600 software saves page images in png format. I think that or tiff is recommended for OCR purposes, as jpg is a lossy format that doesn't do well with sharp edges, if I recall correctly. It takes me about an hour to scan a 250 page book, and less than five more minutes to do the OCR. I save both so that when I come back and proof the OCR text I can look at the page image to figure out the bad conversions. I've found that ABBYY cheap edition works best with grey-scale images, not b/w - I've never felt the need to make any manual adjustments to the scanned images.

03-08-2011, 03:46 PM	#1
CallOfCth'reader Cultist Posts: 195 Karma: 8624438 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: UK Device: Sony PRS 505, Kobo Mini, Kobo Glo, Kobo Forma, Kindle DX	Archiving books (and magazines) - best way? I've got a lot of old paper books which I don't want to keep (mainly for space reasons), but I'd love to have them in electronic format. Unfortunately, I've yet to find any of them in digital print. The only option open to me, for the moment at least, is to archive them myself. The ultimate aim, when I get round to it, is to convert the archived books to LRF and/or EPUB format. What is the best way to initially archive them, for when I (eventually, maybe) convert them to LRF/EPUB in the future? I'm thinking scan the pages, and then stitch them up into a PDF file. I've read that PDF's aren't good to OCR from though, so what are my options? Save each page as a JPG? A lot of the books are 20-40 years old, and the magazines about 20+ years old, so the pages are various shades of...um...sepia. When I save the page scans, do I just save them 'as is' and do contrast tweaking when I eventually OCR them?

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03-08-2011, 04:08 PM	#2
pholy Booklegger Posts: 1,801 Karma: 7999816 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Device: BeBook(1 & 2010), PEZ, PRS-505, Kobo BT, PRS-T1, Playbook, Kobo Touch	My Opticbook3600 software saves page images in png format. I think that or tiff is recommended for OCR purposes, as jpg is a lossy format that doesn't do well with sharp edges, if I recall correctly. It takes me about an hour to scan a 250 page book, and less than five more minutes to do the OCR. I save both so that when I come back and proof the OCR text I can look at the page image to figure out the bad conversions. I've found that ABBYY cheap edition works best with grey-scale images, not b/w - I've never felt the need to make any manual adjustments to the scanned images.

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