Quote:
Originally Posted by WaltC
Ana,
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I really like the idea of converting some of my older/favorite titles.
I hope you don't mind some additional questions?
You're using "ABBYY FineReader 11 Professional Edition"? Does it work on an entire image-only PDF file that you got from 1dollarscan, or did you need to break it up some into smaller chunks? After that, you manually proof it? How long does that typically take? And then you convert it to ebook format?
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Ah, man, sorry I was away so long. I'll answer this here, and maybe ping you in PM in case you don't see this.
Yes, I'm using the ABBYY FineReader 11 Professional. Picked it up on sale awhile back.
My first experience with it left me VERY disappointed because I was using my own scans and the proof-reading and correcting took hours. Literally, 1 book = 6 hours. And even that wasn't perfect and it was a big hassle.
But these 1DollarScans are so clean that ABBYY makes almost no mistakes. I've run through 1 book = 1 hour about 5 times now, and it's been so easy. The only thing you have to watch for is with older books that come with a picture as the first letter in the chapter -- those sometimes "move" in the ABBYY conversion, so you have to move them back. Easy-peasy.
Once ABBYY has processed the book, I save it as an HTML page, and then load that HTML file into Sigil and Save As... Epub. There's probably a faster way, but I like glancing over everything in Sigil before I load into Calibre. It's been 1 book, 1 hour for:
Margaret Mahy's "The Door in the Air and Other Stories". (Picture heavy.)
Mark Twain's "Letters from the Earth" collection that I had.
Several sundry Deathlands books.
The Mark Twain one took a tiny bit longer because it had some special fonts in it that ABBYY preserved but which I didn't want. Weeding them out in Sigil was easy, though.
ABBYY cost me, hmm, about $300, I think?
And a book cutting costs me about $3 a book.
And with packing, shipping, and conversion time, I'm averaging 1.5 hours a book. Less on the "modern" paperbacks with no pictures.
I hope that helps. I can talk about this all day.
