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Old 02-09-2012, 02:36 PM   #1
TechSarge
Junior Member
TechSarge began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 7
Karma: 10
Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Florida USA
Device: Kindle 4 SO (Died), Kindle Fire HD 7"
Best format for scanned books?

I'm a bit new to the ebook world. I'm trying to make a few ebooks from some obscure, out-of-print books. The original formatting runs the gamut: All text, mostly text with some B&W line art (a map, etc.), a book with greyscale photos and text, to a coffee table type book with lots of colour photos inside the text. The text is sometimes standard, single column; but there are at least two books with double column text and one with triple column! This is a nightmare.

The books were all scanned on a flatbed scanner a few years ago, saved to TIFF files. Some are single page, some are double page. I must say that some pages turned out OK, but some are horrible and require manual tweaking.

I discovered Scan Tailor a few days ago and have run it on a few books which are good examples of the headaches above. I LOVE Scan Tailor! What I had started out trying to do a page at a time in Photoshop 5 a few years ago with no experience ST did in minutes across an entire book.

So, few problems now, though.

ST's output TIFFS for the colour photo coffee table book was over 10 times the file size of the originals (orig. about 8 MB, output was ~80-100 MB or more, per file). Everything set to 600 dpi, as that was what they were scanned at, IIRC. I had to run them through PIXresizer to get them to a manageable size again. The B&W output files were wonderful, though.

Not sure where to go from here. I thought so long on how to get the photos retouched that I never considered what to do once they were done! The obvious thing to do is to PDF them at this point, but I'm unsure about that. I would really like to read some of these books on my Kindle 4, so immediately going to PDF now isn't the best option. Shall I OCR, and spend a month proofreading? I'm also very concerned about being able to use the new ebooks in the future with little to no additional manual labour done to them. I'm also trying to get this done as quickly as possible, with as few steps as possible, but with good quality - archive quality not necessary, but close to it is the goal.

I am using a Win7 PC to do this, with Scan Tailor "enhanced" 0.9.11pre, Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, and I have the latest Calibre 0.8.3x.
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