[Gideon]

Well, today I swung by Kinko's to get a binding chopped and then began scanning.

I used to have a Plustek OpticBook, but it is no longer working and since Plustek can't be bothered to reply to their email (and I take that pretty seriously) when I asked about repair I'm not buying another one.

So, I scanned my book with my Canon MP530 multi-function that has a feed scanner (though not duplex, but has a software duplex function.) After some experimenting to figure out the best way to manage this, I eventually settled in doing the 450pg book in about 12 batched, turning them into PDFs as I went.

Something I did wrong was scanned at too high a DPI because I spent most of the evening trying to get the file size down (from about 200+mb). In hopes that some people may get some good out of this, this is how I did it.

I took the basic PDF from the Canon software and opened it in Adobe Acrobat Pro. First thing I did was run the OCR function. I then cropped them in chunks because when I cropped the entire thing already combined, I got some very weird errors. After cropping, I ran the "optimized scan PDF" tool on each chunk. I did this in pieces as well because it works better than doing it as a whole - the size was about a 1/3rd when I optimized in pieces rather than combined. When I finished all of the pieces, I combined them with Acrobat and was done with a file about 23mbs that was still very readable on the Kindle DX.

Would I do it again? Probably not. It takes an enormous amount of time (much longer than the Opticbook, which while requiring me to turn each page, resulted in a usable file MUCH faster - just a couple of hours) - I've been messing with this for about 8 hours (though not intensely.) Also, of course, it damages the book and while I can have it rebound it costs money and will never be as good.

So, I'm going to enjoy being able to read the next book on my que with my Kindle, but I'm sad to see this option isn't available in a reasonable way.