Hi,
If you do not (or cannot due to formulas/diagrams) OCR, you can read the images directly with your favourite slideshow software, or embed them in a blank html and use uBook or your favourite pc software reader.
Pdf's take less space true, but unless we get a portable reader that can read them properly (no scrolling or zooming necessary, pdf page to pdf portable device screen - here portable means something I can use one handed and without mouse/pen) size does not really matter since in all of the above ways you read an image at a time so speed is not an issue and actually it is less memory consuming this way than reading a pdf, you just need enough hard drive space for the images.
This is how I read selected pdf's with my Nokia 770, by cutting the pages (through djvudigital and ddjvu) in half (portrait) or 4 (landscape dble page scan), making sure that each image is 800x480, and using lower quality pnmtojpeg to get manageable size (~40 kb/image or 80 kb/page) since the Nokia screen is good enough. The result is very nicely readable, very fast since Fbreader gets an image at a time, though I lose navigation except page by page. But it is worth it since even with evince pdf's are slow and you need scrolling and so on...
Whenever you have a fast html reader that takes embedded images and enough hard memory this method works nicely as long as you cut to screen size and the result is readable (even on Ebookwise it works for most scans with cutting in half and resizing to 318x448), but of course I would rather read the pdf directly and not have to write the scripts to cut and so on...
We have to see but I think that the Iliad may be able to read nicely a portrait pdf scan, though not a landscape scan, while the Sony reader will not be able to do that due to lower resolution. It may read "reflowable" pdf's, but scans no.
Liviu
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Originally Posted by Bob Russell
The main problem I see with scanning to pdf without OCR is if you want to read on a small screen device or if you need small file sizes. It just wouldn't seem to be useful for mobile reading unless you are using a laptop. Even the new UMPCs might be too small for a scanned book, wouldn't they?
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