Small scanned books

[bowerbird]

excellent work, paul!

-bowerbird

[scotty1024]

Originally Posted by Paul Moews

Any comments ? Can anyone comment on the Iliad display algorithm ?

Paul, as we now know the iLiad is rendering all PDF's in 24 bit color and then converting that to 8 bit grey scale with an error distribution routine that kinda sorta looks like anti-aliasing.

When I take your scan of Real Soldier's of Fortune and display it using the PDF viewer version I produced that uses a pure 8 bit grey path it looks very sharp and the illustrations are very nice.

If you still have 2.7 on your iLiad I suggest you give it a try.

[scotty1024]

Paul you might want to check out the DJVU format for your small scanned books. If you still have 2.7 on your iLiad I've posted a very quick DJVU viwer to the projects download section here on MR.

[Paul Moews]

Thanks to all for comments about the methods used to display scanned books on the Iliad - I now regret all the work I did trying to improve my PDF's for the Iliad. Simply cropping my 600 dpi PDF's is probably the best way to go. The advantages of scanning are lost if a lot of work is required to make the pages suitable for viewing.

The 44 volumes of Little Masterpieces are now available at 600 dpi. They show well on the Iliad and on the Sony Reader in landscape mode. The whole set at 600 dpi comes to 365 MB and easily fits on a 512 MB SD card.

The set titles are:

Volume I: Thackeray, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (7.5M) format.
Volume II: Ruskin, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (7.7M) format.
Volume III: Carlyle, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (8.4M) format.
Volume IV: Macaulay, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (8.3M) format.
Volume V: Hawthorne, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (7.8M) format.
Volume VI: Irving, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (8.3M) format.
Volume VII: Poe, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (8.5M) format.
Volume VIII: de Quincey, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (7.6M) format.
Volume IX: Lincoln, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (7.7M) format.
Volume X: Lamb, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (6.8M) format.
Volume XI: Webster, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (9.4M) format.
Volume XII: Franklin, ed. Bliss Perry. 600 dpi PDF (8.1M) format.
Volume XIII: Humor, ed. Thomas L. Masson. 600 dpi PDF (8.7M) format.
Volume XIV: Humor, ed. Thomas L. Masson. 600 dpi PDF (8.2M) format.
Volume XV: Humor, ed. Thomas L. Masson. 600 dpi PDF (8.1M) format.
Volume XVI: Humor, ed. Thomas L. Masson. 600 dpi PDF (8.2M) format.
Volume XVII: Humor, ed. Thomas L. Masson. 600 dpi PDF (8.1M) format.
Volume XVIII: Humor, ed. Thomas L. Masson. 600 dpi PDF (7.2M) format.
Volume XIX: Poetry, ed. Henry van Dyke. Ballads old and new. 600 dpi PDF (9.1M) format.
Volume XX: Poetry, ed. Henry van Dyke. Idyls and stories in verse. 600 dpi PDF (10.0M) format.
Volume XXI: Poetry, ed. Henry van Dyke. Lyrics.

Volumes 19-24 of the Library of Little Masterpieces series was originally published in 1905 as Little Masterpieces of English Poetry (6 vols.), edited by Henry van Dyke and Hardin Craig, and published by Doubleday, Page & Company. Volume 21 of the Library of Little Masterpieces therefore corresponds to volume 3 of this series, available in 600 dpi PDF (8.9M) format.

Volume XXII: Poetry, ed. Henry van Dyke. Odes, sonnets and epigrams. 600 dpi PDF (8.7M) format.
Volume XXIII: Poetry, ed. Henry van Dyke. Descriptive and reflective verse. 600 dpi PDF (8.8M) format.
Volume XXIV: Poetry, ed. Henry van Dyke. Elegies and hymns. 600 dpi PDF (7.3M) format. Includes indices of poems in the six poetry volumes by first lines and authors.
Volume XXV: Science, ed. George Iles. Inventions. 600 dpi PDF (9.1M) format.
Volume XXVI: Science, ed. George Iles. Naturalists. 600 dpi PDF (9.1M) format.
Volume XXVII: Science, ed. George Iles. Explorers. 600 dpi PDF (9.1M) format.
Volume XXVIII: Science, ed. George Iles. Earth. 600 dpi PDF (10.5M) format.
Volume XXIX: Science, ed. George Iles. Health. 600 dpi PDF (8.8M) format.
Volume XXX: Science, ed. George Iles. Mind. 600 dpi PDF (9.5M) format.
Volume XXXI: Autobiography, ed. George Iles. Greatest Americans. 600 dpi PDF (8.9M) format.
Volume XXXII: Autobiography, ed. George Iles. Soldiers and explorers. 600 dpi PDF (8.8M) format.
Volume XXXIII: Autobiography, ed. George Iles. Men of science. 600 dpi PDF (9.1M) format.
Volume XXXIV: Autobiography, ed. George Iles. Writers. 600 dpi PDF (8.4M) format.
Volume XXXV: Autobiography, ed. George Iles. Artists and composers. 600 dpi PDF (8.6M) format.
Volume XXXVI: Autobiography, ed. George Iles. Actors. 600 dpi PDF (8.8M) format.
Volume XXXVII: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (8.4M) format.
Volume XXXVIII: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (8.8M) format.
Volume XXXIX: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (9.0M) format.
Volume XL: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (8.3M) format.
Volume XLI: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (8.2M) format.
Volume XLII: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (8.5M) format.
Volume XLIII: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (8.4M) format.
Volume XLIV: Fiction, ed. Hamilton W. Mabie. 600 dpi PDF (8.6M) format. Includes cumulative author
index of the series.


The volumes converted to 300 dpi and previously posted are still available. You can find all these files at:

http://djm.cc/dmoews.html

Scroll to the bottom of the page. My thanks to David Moews for hosting these files.

These little volumes were published by the Review of Reviews company in 1909. They seem to have been choosen to instruct and amuse - mostly short pieces to be read in a single session. Many are still of interest. Examples are George Washington's letters to the British generals, Gage and Howe, complaining about their treatment of prisoners, Benjamin Franklin's "Rules of Conduct", and DeQuincey on Opium. Fiction includes many short stories - Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum", etc. - "Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers", etc.

The books were approximately 4 x 6 inches in size with a bright red embossed binding – possibly pyroxylin coated buckram. They had a tissue covered frontispiece and a title page embellished with red.

The pages were scanned at 600 dpi and cropped to 3.5 x 5 inches which is sufficient to enclose the type block. Blank pages preceding the first page of the first story were omitted. As the pages are smaller that the space available on the Iliad they are displayed at a size slightly larger, (~117%), than the original. On Sony's book reader they display, in landscape half a page at a time, at almost the same size, (~120%).

I hope these books are of some interest. Small books, for a variety of reasons, have always been popular. There are many out of copyright books which fit nicely on the Iliad and could easily be converted to 600 dpi PDF files.

I would be interested in comments from anyone who reads the above volumes on either the Iliad or the Sony reader.

[nekokami]

Hi Paul,

I know you've decided not to use OCR for your historical books, but do you know what OCR the scansnap ships with, if any? And do you have any comments on different scansnap models? I have some documents I'm considering scanning to OCR, and I'm wondering if the scansnap would work as well for my purposes as it has for yours.

Thanks,

[Paul Moews]

The scan snap is a bit limited in its software. It comes with a copy of
Adobe Acrobat 7 - I believe the newer models still come bundled with
Acrobat. Scans can only be saved as PDF's or JPEG's but PDF's can be
converted to tifs with Acrobat.

Acrobat does contain an OCR module - it works best with business documents
and not so well with old books which often contain difficult to recognize fonts.
Once converted and proofed the PDF's can be saved as text or rich text format files.

I have tried some inexpensive OCR software that accepts PDF files as input
but haven't found them much better than Adobe Acrobat.

[nekokami]

Thanks, Paul -- this is very helpful. I'm looking at scanning documents of my own that I've lost the electronic originals for, and some journal articles provided by instructors for courses I've taken. (In some cases I have these as PDF, but it's a "scanned" non-searchable PDF-- I'd like to be able to copy snippets of text to a research database, with the citation -- it's dissertation proposal time!) I can scare up a copy of Acrobat here at work to test on before I decide whether to buy a copy, but I've been considering buying it for a while now for other reasons anyway. I was just wondering if I would also then have to purchase Readiris or something to do the OCR -- hopefully Acrobat will do the trick.

[nrapallo]

Thanks Paul!

I've always admired your efforts here and even considered OCR'ing some of these .pdf's for my own personal use.

However, I want to share a "tip" about getting the OCR'ed text the easy way: get Google's extracted text via their bot search of Paul's website.

If you search using this term: "site:djm.cc/library/ filetype:pdf" (without the quotes), you will get Google's listings of Paul's .pdf archives (or just click here).

Now, just click 'View as HTML' and you will get a 'free' OCR'ed text version of the .pdf ebook. Some work better than others, though. It's a cheat, but it works!

Have fun!

EDIT: Oops, only yields the first 50 pages! Sorry, maybe not such a good tip for larger books! :(