Best way to archive a book - PDF?

[CallOfCth'reader]

I'm at the point where I need to get rid of a number of books, due to space considerations. They are almost all second-hand books, in a condition where they wouldn't grace anyone's bookshelf, and almost every one is not available in e-book format to buy.

I don't mind destroying the books, so that I can get flat scans of the pages (and at least it makes the paper easier to recycle), but what is the best format to archive them to?

My immediate thought was archive to PDF, and then convert to EPUB as and when I have the time and inclination to do it. How good is OCRing from PDFs? Or should I just archive the scans themselves, and OCR as and when?

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by CallOfCth'reader

I'm at the point where I need to get rid of a number of books, due to space considerations. They are almost all second-hand books, in a condition where they wouldn't grace anyone's bookshelf, and almost every one is not available in e-book format to buy.

I don't mind destroying the books, so that I can get flat scans of the pages (and at least it makes the paper easier to recycle), but what is the best format to archive them to?

My immediate thought was archive to PDF, and then convert to EPUB as and when I have the time and inclination to do it. How good is OCRing from PDFs? Or should I just archive the scans themselves, and OCR as and when?

I can't speak to everything, but you may want to save your archive in several formats, rather than relying on just one. For example, you could save the OCR results as plain text, RTF, and OpenDocument Text. Each will preserve the text, and RTF and OpenDocument Text will preserve some of the formatting. With each of these formats there should be always be tools readily available that will allow you to open them. For example with plain text, as far as I know all computers, come preloaded with an application to open them. Also, you could save the scans as a graphic file (like a .jpg) to preserve the look of the original page.

As far as PDF goes, I view PDF as a good final destination format since it preserves all of the formatting. However, I don't keep PDFs as my archive copy. Rather, I save my archive copy in other formats (mostly OpenDocument Text) and generate the PDF from that. The main reason for this is that PDFs tend to be good at one size, and not so good at other sizes. But I can take the archive source, adjust the formatting, and make a PDF appropriate for whatever use I need (such as on my computer screen, on my reader, or on paper).

I hope this helps.

[rmm200]

I really suggest RTF or EPub for archival purposes. PDF will never convert well to EPub. As Solitaire said, PDFs should be viewed as a final destination; not something you generate other formats from.

Robert

[Jellby]

In addition to the text versions, I would keep a PDF made from the raw (or minimally pre-processed) scanned images, at least until you've read the book and fix all possible issues. Too often the OCR gets screwed and you really need to check the printed book (or the scans) to see what's really there.

[chainring]

In addition to what Jellby has already said, that raw pdf (no ocr performed) can then later on be run through a program (Abbyy FineReader, for example) that takes pdf input and does its recognition to do the ocr. You have the archive, can trash (err, recycle) the book and move onto another one then come back for the ocr process at a later point.