Basic tutorial please (for Dummies)

[captaingeorges]

Hi Guys!

I have been reading this forum for the last 4 months or so... You got me . convinced, I got my Cybook and I love it.

There is a lot of the posts that I read that sounds a bit like chinese to me, when you talk about Mobipearl, mobicreator .this and .that

Could somebody give just a Book creation 101 course please for dummies like me!

I imagine that you scan a book with an optical reconnaissance character software???

what do you use ???

Do you use a regular scanner???

What are the steps ?




Thanks a bunch




Georges

I am curious???

[HarryT]

Hi Georges,

I don't think that very many of us scan books ourselves - it involved a heck of a lot of work! What we mostly talk about here (and in the other forum sections) are tools (such as the one you've mentioned - MobiPocket Creator) which create MobiPocket books from other formats (text, HTML, etc).

[captaingeorges]

Thanks Harry!

But when you talked about new books to upload or books that you are working on or the Gutenberg project, I guess somebody must be scanning them ???

Regards


Georges

[lmarie]

Okay, I'm going to jump in and ask a (dumb?) question, since I'm new to the Gen3 and eink readers. How do I tell how much room I have left on the Gen3? (It was easy to tell on Palm and E1150.) I've looked through the menu but can't find it. Or, do I have to hook it up to the computer and look at it that way?

Thanks,

Lelah

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by lmarie

Or, do I have to hook it up to the computer and look at it that way?

Yes, that's the way to do it. If you use a 2GB SD card, though, you can really put whatever you want on there without having to worry about it. I currently have about 120 books on my Gen3 and am using about 5% of the card's capacity.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by captaingeorges

Thanks Harry!

But when you talked about new books to upload or books that you are working on or the Gutenberg project, I guess somebody must be scanning them ???

Regards


Georges

There are. Just as there are people who buy a scanner and start scanning in the dead-tree books they've accumulated in their personal libraries. I'd recommend either building a book jig to hold the book open while you take digitial photos of each page with a cheap 5-7mp camera or that you buy a scanner which is designed to hold the book's pages flat - the only inexpensive one is the Plustek OpticBook - it runs between $250-$350 on eBay.

Once you've got the pages scanned/photo'd, you need to either bundle them into a PDF file, or run them through the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to generate a text file of the page images. There are some decent, inexpensive ones available but the OpticBook comes with one bundled in with the rest of the software.

After creating the text file, and cropping any book images into individual image files, you then need to edit the content of the text files. Most books use slightly different fonts and unless you're willing to 'train' the OCR software, the software will probably only get 85%-95% of the characters right. Not only that, but the scanning process - unless you set the cropping factors right - will capture the page headers and footers as well, which means the basic file will have a bunch of page numbers, titles and authors' names scattered throughout the text - and will break paragraphs, and even words, inappropriately.

Once the text files have been edited, you can then create either an RTF, PDF or HTML document containing the text and any associated images and then run that through either Mobigen or BookDesigner to create your ebook file.

Simple! (But somewhat labor intensive.)

Derek

[captaingeorges]

Thanks Derek!

That is exactly what I wanted to know... I do not think I will get into that very soon...

Too busy reading books on my new Cybook and shoveling snow...

Georges