Quote:
Originally Posted by kazbates
Argggg! Why isn't anything staright forward anymore?!?! I've got this new scanner that does a great job but getting the scanned book into an exceptable ebook format is causing me to pull out my hair!!!! It would be nice if there were instructions somewhere for lay people. I've started a thread in the Workshop forum and know that I will get excellent advice from many of MR's extremely intelligent members, but right now I'm incredibly frustrated and feel like I've bitten of more than I can chew.  |
Which scanner?
There are several steps involved.
1) Scan the book. The result will be images, probably in TIFF format.
2) Extract the text. This requires using OCR software, that scans the image and looks for things that look like letters. It can output what it finds to another file. OCR software is usually bundled with scanners. It will be fairly low end consumer grade software, but it';s normally adequate for simple stuff. (The software I have, for example, get's mightily confused by multi-column text.)
3) Proofread and copy edit the resulting text file. No OCR software is perfect, and it
will make mistakes. One of the complaints about various Kindle editions is poor production quality. This is a result of Amazon starting with a paper copy, because an electronic manuscript isn't available, and doing scan and OCR. Proofreading and copy editing
aren't done. Amazon puts the results out as a Kindle file. The results come as no surprise.
4) Convert the edited text to an ebook. This might be done directly, but it's probably wiser to convert the text to HTML,
then convert to ebook. There are tools available to automate this, but like scan/OCR, they aren't perfect. You need to edit the generated HTML for best results. So this might be two steps: text->HTML, HTML->ebook.
Precise instructions will depend upon what software you have, and what ebook formats you want to generate.
______
Dennis