Can you download books you already own on a sony reader/kindle?

[bla]

It depends how much you think your time is worth... a lot of ebooks can be had for like 5 bucks ....scanning even a short book can take a long time and then there is the whole ocr thing... I only did it once for a text book that was out of print.... never again.. I ended up scanning the thing into image format as a pdf... ended up as a 100mb monster and it took me the whole day and then some... do a google for the books you want you may be surprised at what you can fund

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by bla

It depends how much you think your time is worth... a lot of ebooks can be had for like 5 bucks ....scanning even a short book can take a long time and then there is the whole ocr thing... I only did it once for a text book that was out of print.... never again.. I ended up scanning the thing into image format as a pdf... ended up as a 100mb monster and it took me the whole day and then some... do a google for the books you want you may be surprised at what you can fund

The books I scan tend to be rare and out of print. In some rare cases, they may be available as an ebook for sale, but without the original illustrations, which are important to me.

As for googling, I remember finding a couple titles through the Open Library, but they were awful. I cleaned one up and proofread, but honestly, would have been faster to scan and OCR from the start myself.

Most of the titles I want are fairly obscure, aren't likely to come to ebook form soon, if ever, and because the print versions are so rare, pirate versions tend not to exist.

Anyway, I'm a re-reader, and digitizing a few titles for my library has become a fun hobby. It's definitely not for everyone!

[Toxaris]

Most of the books I like to read are out of print. Most of the scans floating around are done so poorly, that I gladly put in the time to do it myself. If I would read the poor one, I would not have a good reading experience and it would be a distraction from the story.

[Ripplinger]

Yes, I'm also talking about books long out of print that I wanted to reread. Of course if it's available anywhere in ebook format, I'd buy that and not do a scan. And if it's a poor quality ebook, I'll fix it. Like Toxaris said, it really detracts from the book when you're struggling with ugly or bad formatting and I don't enjoy reading that way.

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Err, no. My digitized books are of a better quality than a lot of retails...

Same here. The layout decisions made (or not made, as the case may be) for some retail books are amazing. My favorites as seen in the wild, all for body text: "font-size: x-small;", "text-indent:92px;", "text-indent:1.7in;", and finally, "line-height:237%;". In the last case someone actually decided that double height was not enough.

These are luckily quick to amend, but I've also seen laziness like obviously unprocessed OCR input in retail epubs.