Keeping Scanned Books As Images Only

Agent69 · 11-15-2014, 10:20 PM

I have some books I want to convert to an electronic format. Searching through the forums, it appears that most people convert/OCR their books after scanning but I would prefer not to do that and to keep them just as plain image files.

Does anyone here do this? I am thinking of scanning to high resolution tiff and then converting to jpg for use on my iPad.

Thanks in advance.

rkomar · 11-16-2014, 12:45 AM

I did it with my old textbooks and reference books. I used pdfbeads to put the images together into a PDF file after first cleaning up the images (using unpaper). Many people use scantailor for this. It's pretty simple, except for the "bookmarks" that are essential for reference books. Those just take work typing in the headings and calculating the page offset for each.

Pages with photographic images also took more work. If you leave the whole page as grayscale, then the text doesn't show up very well on an E-Ink device. I ended up writing a program for selecting areas that should be left as grayscale, and binarizing everything else to make the text stand out better. That makes it easy to read and keeps the file size down.

I don't recommend using JPEG for text unless you keep the conversion quality high. If you drop the quality, the text gets a bit washed out.

DSpider · 11-16-2014, 05:00 AM

Scan Tailor, grayscale, wapped up in a PDF. But they take up a lot of space, compared to OCR-ed content (which you would most likely need to proofread).

Agent69 · 11-16-2014, 10:21 AM

Thanks you both.

11-15-2014, 10:20 PM	#1
Agent69 Junior Member Posts: 8 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2014 Device: none	Keeping Scanned Books As Images Only I have some books I want to convert to an electronic format. Searching through the forums, it appears that most people convert/OCR their books after scanning but I would prefer not to do that and to keep them just as plain image files. Does anyone here do this? I am thinking of scanning to high resolution tiff and then converting to jpg for use on my iPad. Thanks in advance.

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11-16-2014, 12:45 AM	#2
rkomar Wizard Posts: 2,992 Karma: 18346231 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Sudbury, ON, Canada Device: PRS-505, PB 902, PRS-T1, PB 623, PB 840, PB 633	I did it with my old textbooks and reference books. I used pdfbeads to put the images together into a PDF file after first cleaning up the images (using unpaper). Many people use scantailor for this. It's pretty simple, except for the "bookmarks" that are essential for reference books. Those just take work typing in the headings and calculating the page offset for each. Pages with photographic images also took more work. If you leave the whole page as grayscale, then the text doesn't show up very well on an E-Ink device. I ended up writing a program for selecting areas that should be left as grayscale, and binarizing everything else to make the text stand out better. That makes it easy to read and keeps the file size down. I don't recommend using JPEG for text unless you keep the conversion quality high. If you drop the quality, the text gets a bit washed out.

11-16-2014, 05:00 AM	#3
DSpider Evangelist Posts: 450 Karma: 343115 Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: Romania Device: PW2 2014	Scan Tailor, grayscale, wapped up in a PDF. But they take up a lot of space, compared to OCR-ed content (which you would most likely need to proofread).

11-16-2014, 10:21 AM	#4
Agent69 Junior Member Posts: 8 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2014 Device: none	Thanks you both.

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