Hello and a request that i will pay CASH for

[jodad]

Hi there Guys,

Im Jo from England.

I have a Kindle 4 and few sets of books that I need converted and organised. These aren’t books that are available online as eBooks but rather old books that have been turned into PDFs. To be honest I don’t know much about the conversion process. I have had limited success converting epubs into mobis for my kindle but they never look good and their formatting is rubbish.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I have a few large PDFs (approx. 45 mb) that I would like converted into mobi so that I can read them comfortable on my Kindle. I am looking for someone who is good at this PDF to mobi conversion to convert them for me and I am willing to pay a little if necessary. I have tried the various processes myself and they never work well which is why I am hoping a “pro” can help.

I’d really appreciate the help.

Please get in touch if you think you can do this for me or with recomendations of people that can.

Thanks Guys!


Jo

[pdurrant]

If the books have just been scanned and turned into PDFs with images as pages, that's a job that will require OCR and proofing. It's not a simple conversion job.

For ePub conversion for your Kindle 4, convert to azw3, not mobi.

[HarryT]

The best way to convert page-scanned PDFs to an eBook format is generally to use a decent OCR program such as Abbyy Finereader.

[jodad]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

If the books have just been scanned and turned into PDFs with images as pages, that's a job that will require OCR and proofing. It's not a simple conversion job.

For ePub conversion for your Kindle 4, convert to azw3, not mobi.

Thanks for that pdurrant, I am pretty sure it hasn’t been scanned as images as I can select text with the cursor when I open the file on an ereader on my laptop. Plus I did try the conversion myself using calibre and the words came out accurately but the formatting and spacing between lines and random line breaks etc. was horrific and the contents table was a mess as well.
The PDF seems to be a very well formatted file and as a pdf it works beautifully on my computer which is why I think it could be converted well into a format for my kindle – I am just too rubbish to do it 

[jodad]

Ok, just to confirm, my understanding is that if the PDF is formatted as a bunch of images, when I open the file on an e reader on my computer, I wouldn’t be able to select the text itself. Am I correct here?
If this is the case then no, my PDF is not formatted as an image.

By the way, thanks for your comments so far guys!

[HarryT]

You may or may not be correct. A PDF can have both page images and a text layer allowing searching. A 45MB PDF strongly suggests page scans; a text-only PDF would be much smaller.

Direct conversion of PDF to Mobi or KF8 is never going to work well. Extensive manual editing is going to be required. You will not find anyone to do that for you free of charge - it's just grunt work; dozens and dozens of hours of it for a typical book.

That's why I suggesting using a decent OCR program. It won't be perfect, but it will give you results that are enormously better than a direct conversion of the PDF.

[jodad]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You may or may not be correct. A PDF can have both page images and a text layer allowing searching. A 45MB PDF strongly suggests page scans; a text-only PDF would be much smaller.

Direct conversion of PDF to Mobi or KF8 is never going to work well. Extensive manual editing is going to be required. You will not find anyone to do that for you free of charge - it's just grunt work; dozens and dozens of hours of it for a typical book.

That's why I suggesting using a decent OCR program. It won't be perfect, but it will give you results that are enormously better than a direct conversion of the PDF.

Hmm...
Well it is about 6000 pages. Could that explain the file size?
When i get home i will try the ocr software and see how it works.
I am however willing to offer some payment to whoever agrees to do the conversion for me if the OCR method doesnt work well.

Lets see.

Thanks Harry

[HarryT]

6000 pages would certainly explain it, but I fear you underestimate the work required to edit such a mammoth work. If you paid someone the minimum wage to do it for you, it would cost you thousands of pounds. The best thing to do is to use a good OCR program (as I've already mentioned), convert it to ePub (for ease of editing) and then learn how to use an ePub editor, such as Calibre or Sigil.

However you do it, you have a huge job ahead of you. Certainly hundreds of hours of work. I've edited many (hundred) eBooks, and being able to do 10 pages an hour is fast, so 6000 pages is at least 600 hours work. A lot more, given the fact that I'm guessing you'd be starting the learning experience of how to edit a book from quite a low level of current knowledge.

Anyway, try the OCR, and see where it gets you. Do you have access to a good OCR program?

[jodad]

Originally Posted by HarryT

6000 pages would certainly explain it, but I fear you underestimate the work required to edit such a mammoth work. If you paid someone the minimum wage to do it for you, it would cost you thousands of pounds. The best thing to do is to use a good OCR program (as I've already mentioned), convert it to ePub (for ease of editing) and then learn how to use an ePub editor, such as Calibre or Sigil.

However you do it, you have a huge job ahead of you. Certainly hundreds of hours of work. I've edited many (hundred) eBooks, and being able to do 10 pages an hour is fast, so 6000 pages is at least 600 hours work. A lot more, given the fact that I'm guessing you'd be starting the learning experience of how to edit a book from quite a low level of current knowledge.

Anyway, try the OCR, and see where it gets you. Do you have access to a good OCR program?

Harry, thanks so much for your advice here.
I will try the OCR method when I get home. I have to be honest, if not great at using the converter software. I haven’t found a decent step by step tutorial, just pages with technical wording etc. that I don’t get so well.
And yes, I didn’t realise it would take that long to work on and would need THAT much work so obviously that would be expensive.

As for access to OCR software, no I don’t have any at the moment but I guess there are a few free ones online? You suggested Abbyy Finereader. I will look for that.

[HarryT]

I'm going to move this thread to the "Workshop" forum. That's the appropriate place for it, and other people will probably offer their views there.

[jodad]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm going to move this thread to the "Workshop" forum. That's the appropriate place for it, and other people will probably offer their views there.

Sure thing. Cheers.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by jodad

Ok, just to confirm, my understanding is that if the PDF is formatted as a bunch of images, when I open the file on an e reader on my computer, I wouldn’t be able to select the text itself. Am I correct here?
If this is the case then no, my PDF is not formatted as an image.

By the way, thanks for your comments so far guys!

At 6,000 pages, 45MB is less than 8KB per page, so I expect that your PDF is a proper text-only PDF, not (as I'd previously thought) images.

In which case conversion is going to be a lot easier. I suspect that you'll get best results with a converter that knows to trim headers/footers/page numbers from each page. I hope someone with more direct knowledge of PDF conversion will be along shortly to suggest programs.

But it's unlikely that even a very good program will always get paragraphs right. And if there's any complicated formatting (e.g. poetry or (worse) equations or chemical formulae) probably no tool will work very well.

PDF, alas, was always intended as a 'write only' format. Converting from PDF to anything else is error prone and time consuming. Good luck!

[jodad]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

At 6,000 pages, 45MB is less than 8KB per page, so I expect that your PDF is a proper text-only PDF, not (as I'd previously thought) images.

In which case conversion is going to be a lot easier. I suspect that you'll get best results with a converter that knows to trim headers/footers/page numbers from each page. I hope someone with more direct knowledge of PDF conversion will be along shortly to suggest programs.

But it's unlikely that even a very good program will always get paragraphs right. And if there's any complicated formatting (e.g. poetry or (worse) equations or chemical formulae) probably no tool will work very well.

PDF, alas, was always intended as a 'write only' format. Converting from PDF to anything else is error prone and time consuming. Good luck!

Thanks for your comments pdurrant. I will try Harrys OCR suggestion.
If anyone else has any other ideas, please feel free to chime in!
Thanks guys!

[Toxaris]

I would OCR the book with ABBYY, save it as Word document and then use my add-in to thoroughly clean it up and repair most of the errors. The add-in has various tools that will do that (semi-)automatically for you. That would save a lot of time. Then you can export it to ePUB, but don't expect it too look the same as the source (depending on the source though). However, you can style the ePUB as you want with a stylesheet.

If you want a perfect copy, you will need to go through every page to see if all the breaks and punctuation is correct. You can only manage that by proofreading.

[jodad]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I would OCR the book with ABBYY, save it as Word document and then use my add-in to thoroughly clean it up and repair most of the errors. The add-in has various tools that will do that (semi-)automatically for you. That would save a lot of time. Then you can export it to ePUB, but don't expect it too look the same as the source (depending on the source though). However, you can style the ePUB as you want with a stylesheet.

If you want a perfect copy, you will need to go through every page to see if all the breaks and punctuation is correct. You can only manage that by proofreading.

Sweet. Lets try LOL!
I will dload your add in
Thanks Toxaris