Turn your paper books into (Kindle) e-books

[eschwartz]

Interesting.

They should accept EPUBs too, so we can get decent quality Personal Books.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Interesting.

They should accept EPUBs too, so we can get decent quality Personal Books.

Don't need to pay to do that:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211

Kindlegen does it for free.

[rem736]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

And if there is no ebook version?

That is why people say ABBYY Finereader is worth the money.

good point. for some reason, i missed that when writing this.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Don't need to pay to do that:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211

Kindlegen does it for free.

The point I was attempting to make, is that according to rumor, this program here will upload your books as personal documents, but they will show up without the Personal banner, and can be downloaded without charge over 3G.

kindlegen is just a converter.



Some people might think that the lack of that Personal banner is worth it. (Not me, I know that much.)

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by zebradude

the item becomes a document and not a book and you would be charged to download it on the go on 3G and I'm not sure if it syncs to the last page read?

Personal Docs do synchronise and if you have non-3G Kindles, just send it to one and then you can get it from the cloud over 3G free.

[ab78727]

As for book scanning and OCR, I have used bookscan.us for most of my books (300+) as well as a Canon Scantini for personal papers and such. The output is OCR'ed PDF, which suits my non-Kindle ecosystem .

[crich70]

Originally Posted by ab78727

As for book scanning and OCR, I have used bookscan.us for most of my books (300+) as well as a Canon Scantini for personal papers and such. The output is OCR'ed PDF, which suits my non-Kindle ecosystem .

How big a file does one of their scans render? I mean is it 1 mb or less for the average book or 10-20mb?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by crich70

How big a file does one of their scans render? I mean is it 1 mb or less for the average book or 10-20mb?

I have a large number of scanned out-of-copyright PDF books for my Egyptology course. The smallest (a 92-page book) is 11MB; the largest is over 100MB.

[DrChiper]

And what scan setting did you use? 300 dpi? Or less?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DrChiper

And what scan setting did you use? 300 dpi? Or less?

I didn't scan them myself. They are books downloaded from the Internet; primarily from the site:

http://www.memphis.edu/egypt/onlinebiblio.php

[DrChiper]

My bad. As this thread was about turning paper books into e-books I assumed you made those PDF's yourself.

Interesting Egyptian document site though

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DrChiper

My bad. As this thread was about turning paper books into e-books I assumed you made those PDF's yourself.

A reasonable assumption. I should have been clearer, sorry.

[fjtorres]

A raw bitmap of a B&W 600DPI scanned book *page* will run about 1 MB--less for mmpb and more for trade and hardcover. Compressing the file can reduce the size by a factor of 10, scanning in grayscale will increase it. It is generally best to go light on the compression.

For OCR'ing I've found the 600dpi 16 gray multipage tiffs work best. Leaves me with a single file for the OCR software to process unattended.

[ab78727]

I scan my documents at 200dpi and black-and white and get files that are anywhere from 1MB - 4MB.

For bookscan.us, I request for most books that they scan in black-and-white and they oblige - the resulting books are still 4MB - 20MB. I then load them in Adobe X and save them as Reduced Size PDF, which cuts the size down to 1MB - 4MB. My tired old eyes don't notice a degradation but that is me.

I have plenty of books that are color or grayscale and for those, I ask bookscan.us to scan appropriately (color if I care to preserve the color, else grayscale); these books turn out to be big (the largest one was a 1000 page business book at 150MB) but again Adobe X helps here (150MB -> 40MB).

Hope this helps.

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by ab78727

I have used bookscan.us for most of my books

I haven't been aware of bookscan.us, I've used 1dollarscan.com so far, but bookscan.us seems to be much cheaper. I've just asked them, they accept shipment directly from Amazon or any other vendor, at no extra cost (1dollarscan charges double prices in that case). I'm in Europe, postage fees across the Atlantic are prohibitive for any books on my shelves, but buying a book (new or used) from Amazon in the US and having it shipped directly to the scanning facility has worked well so far. For OCR, I feed the PDFs to Abbyy -- it still needs careful editing, though, to really clean up all the OCR errors.