New trend? digitize your books for $1USD each.

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by anamardoll:

I feed my 1DollarScan PDFs into ABBYY, save to HTML, and open that in Sigil.

Hey, Anamardoll, I've been meaning to ask you about this. I have been trying out the Sprint version of ABBYY. When I tried to make my first eBook, I saved the OCR to HTML and was going to use that with Sigil, but it had a lot of horizontal lines throughout, so I ended up just saving it to a text file. I tried it several times and kept getting odd lines in the HTML, sometimes going right through the text. Have you had any issues like this with the professional version?

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by blue_skies

Hey, Anamardoll, I've been meaning to ask you about this. I have been trying out the Sprint version of ABBYY. When I tried to make my first eBook, I saved the OCR to HTML and was going to use that with Sigil, but it had a lot of horizontal lines throughout, so I ended up just saving it to a text file. I tried it several times and kept getting odd lines in the HTML, sometimes going right through the text. Have you had any issues like this with the professional version?

No, I've never seen that before -- that sounds very strange! Has that been with multiple books or just a single one? It almost sounds like the scan is bad.

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

No, I've never seen that before -- that sounds very strange! Has that been with multiple books or just a single one? It almost sounds like the scan is bad.

Every one I've tested has been like that. It's frustrating because I expected to be able to save to HTML to make my ePubs, which would save some of the formatting - right? (Bold, italics, stuff like that?)

Since I've been having to save to text files instead, I have to go through and correct all the formatting myself, which is very time-consuming.

Here is an example of the OCRed HTML that ABBYY Sprint created:

The scan image had no lines at all on the page. Other HTMLs I made had lines actually going through the text. I don't have one of those to post because I deleted them.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by blue_skies

Since I've been having to save to text files instead, I have to go through and correct all the formatting myself, which is very time-consuming.

IIRC ABBYY Sprint offers saving in RTF and DOC as well as HTM & TXT. Saving in RTF or DOC will (should) retain the formatting you're going to lose with TXT.

The scan image had no lines at all on the page. Other HTMLs I made had lines actually going through the text. I don't have one of those to post because I deleted them.

Not sure what's up with the lines, but have you looked at the HTML code at all?

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

IIRC ABBYY Sprint offers saving in RTF and DOC as well as HTM & TXT. Saving in RTF or DOC will (should) retain the formatting you're going to lose with TXT.

Not sure what's up with the lines, but have you looked at the HTML code at all?

I don't know much about coding, but it looks like it's putting everything into cells.

Maybe I'll give RTF another try. When I first got the scanner, I tried saving in RTF, but that saved really weird too. And I use open office and even though OO is default on my computer for opening .doc files, when I tried to save to .doc, it kept opening my Microsoft office trial.

[Darqref]

Originally Posted by blue_skies

I don't know much about coding, but it looks like it's putting everything into cells.

Maybe I'll give RTF another try. When I first got the scanner, I tried saving in RTF, but that saved really weird too. And I use open office and even though OO is default on my computer for opening .doc files, when I tried to save to .doc, it kept opening my Microsoft office trial.

I use a version of Omnipage, and it has multiple different RTF versions to save. If you use the version that is intended for WordPad (a utility that ships in Windows, at least up to XP) it will retain *most* of the formatting, but not be able to put things in cells or text-windows or such. When I used the version intended for MSWord, it came out in textblocks, which you had to remove before you could do anything constructive.

I bet that ABBYY has a similar option.

[blue_skies]

Originally Posted by Darqref

I use a version of Omnipage, and it has multiple different RTF versions to save. If you use the version that is intended for WordPad (a utility that ships in Windows, at least up to XP) it will retain *most* of the formatting, but not be able to put things in cells or text-windows or such. When I used the version intended for MSWord, it came out in textblocks, which you had to remove before you could do anything constructive.

I bet that ABBYY has a similar option.

I did a couple more tests and when I saved in RTF, it saved the formatting... but when I pasted it into Sigil, all the formatting (bold, italics etc) was gone.

I tried saving another HTML with ABBYY Sprint, from a scan that was 2 pages of an open book. It was terrible. Tons of lines, and they remained when I posted it into Sigil, along with having the pages right next to each other. I would hope that the professional version fixes that when you scan a book in a flat bed scanner.

The text files Sprint makes are fine. It just takes a lot of time to edit.

Thanks for the replies and advice.

I am planning to stop at the post office tomorrow for a flat rate box. I just need to figure out what is worthwhile to send off to be scanned. I have so many freebies from Amazon I know I'll never read. No use scanning a bunch of my own books I know I'll never read either.

[rainsparade]

Hi, sorry to bump an old thread but I was wondering if anyone has used the FineTune service from 1dollarscan.com? http://1dollarscan.com/finetune.php

I was really impressed with the Kindle FuneTune especially as it comes out so much clearer on a Kindle than a regular PDF.

I recently got a bunch of books done through them for the purpose of reading on a Kindle Touch and eventually on an iPad. The quality of the pdfs they've scanned them to is excellent but one thing strikes me as odd:

Normally when you get a book done through them (and pay an extra $1 per set) you get an OCR'ed pdf, however when they FineTune it the OCR isn't there anymore. So you can either get a nice searchable pdf (you can also pay $2 for the high quality OCR option) or a FineTuned pdf but seemingly not both.

My question is: Does anyone know the program they use when they FineTune? I know how to crop the edges (briss) and reduce the size (adobe) but not how to optimize it for Kindle (Resolution optimization, character optimization, dot-by-dot display).

I've tried saving the pdf as black and white but it doesn't make much of a difference. I've also tried using ABBYY finereader to OCR the FineTune'd pdf with horrible results (it looks fine on the computer, and the OCR might even be better than 1dollarscan's but when read on a Kindle there are missing letters etc, which is strange as I thought the pdf was still an image).

I'm also a little puzzled how the compressed the pdf that much (250MB original file from a 500 page book -> 24MB with FineTune, the most I could compress it was to 75MB).

Sorry for the wall of text and congratulations if you've managed to read this far. I just wanted to be as clear as possible.

Thanks.

[blue_skies]

Some Feedback:

I ended up sending 13 books to http://bookscan.us/ a couple weeks ago. I sent them using USPS Media Mail. It cost $7.04 to ship and only $1 each to scan... so the total cost for 13 books was about $20.

Media Mail took a while to deliver, but once the books were received, the books were scanned and uploaded to a dropbox account very quickly.

The scans look fantastic. I was surprised that they even included not only book covers and backs, but also the entire book jacket when there was one.

I didn't get any additional upgrades. The 13 files are about 475 mb total. I will probably eventually OCR them, if I end up upgrading ABBY.

The service was wonderful. I looked over the scans and one PDF had one page with a corner turned over blocking some of the text. I emailed them, and they very quickly rescanned the page and uploaded the new PDF. Customer service was top-rate with very fast and thoughtful communication.

I highly recommend this service and will use them again in the future. It is so much faster and easier than scanning my own books, and a very good bargain.

[pwjone1]

FOr those of you that have used both 1DollarScan and bookscan.us, which would you say has the better image quality, or is it about the same?

[pwjone1]

I am wondering what the ability is to pass along ownership of scanned books is. I, like a lot of I'm sure others, have started buying a lot of books in electronic format, but you cannot really give those to a library or somewhere down the road a descendant. Can these scanned books be passed along?

[pwjone1]

As you probably know, a lot of libraries are struggling a bit to provide eBook versions of their library. Lack of availability, publisher restrictions, etc. But also, libraries get a LOT of donated books, hardcover or other formats, that past a certain number of donations they end up reselling. The person doing the donation gets a tax refund, the library gets a couple of bucks in green cash. But if instead of reselling the books, what would happen if they bulk scanned them into eBooks? Granted, it would cost a certain amount per book, but you have all these extra copies around, practically brand new, and even with the scanning/conversion, frequently the cost would be less than the eBook (and without potentially all the restrictions on usage, etc.).

1. Seems like this would all be allowed usage, anyone work through the legal details?
2. Does any of the bulk scanners specifically support library conversion?
3. Does any of the bulk scanners have a "donate to library" option?
4. Could the library resell eBooks, after the demand drops?
5. Anyone know what sort of inventory managemet (librarything or ?) could be done to make sure library had not "loaned" more copies than it had at any given time?

Hard to get around the book being destroyed aspect, but what really counts is getting the books into people's hands, and especially if we could get people to in effect donate eBooks, that would be pretty straightforward.

[HarryT]

This would almost unquestionably be illegal. Scanning a book for personal use is one thing (and that's what these scan companies are doing); giving copies of the book to third parties without the permission of the copyright holder would be copyright infringement.

[carpetmojo]

Harry's quite correct - but as we all know, the publishers would naturally agree to allow libraries to carry out this operation, perhaps licencing them, for a "peppercorn" pittance, as a contribution towards the betterment of society, by encouraging more reading ......

[pwjone1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

This would almost unquestionably be illegal. Scanning a book for personal use is one thing (and that's what these scan companies are doing); giving copies of the book to third parties without the permission of the copyright holder would be copyright infringement.

Seems like giving copies of the book to third parties without the permission of the copyright holder would be the definition of what a library does, normally. Library has copies it has purchased, it loans them to library members. These would still be purchased (or donated) books, legitimately owned by the library, there's no additional number of copies being created or loaned.