Smartphone Book Scanning: What's Still Missing for PDF and EPUB?

[NurViewer]

Hello everyone!

I've been reading some interesting discussions here on MobileRead about digitizing printed books using smartphones.

In particular, I found the thread "New best practices tutorials" very informative:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=375385

The workflow described there — photographing book pages with a smartphone, processing the images with CamScanner, performing OCR using MinerU or Mistral OCR, and creating EPUB files — is impressive.

It made me think about an interesting question:

Smartphone scanning technology has become remarkably capable. But what are the biggest problems that remain when turning an entire printed book into a high-quality digital book?

Today, applications such as vFlat, CamScanner, and Adobe Scan already offer various combinations of automatic cropping, page flattening, dual-page scanning, image enhancement, and OCR.

However, producing a genuinely useful electronic book can still require several additional processing steps.

I'm particularly interested in the following areas.

1. Image correction after smartphone capture

Modern apps can correct perspective and curved pages, but how reliably do they handle difficult cases?

For example:

- Deep page curvature near the spine
- Fingers holding the book open
- Uneven lighting and shadows
- Thin paper with text showing through from the other side
- Illustrations extending across two facing pages

Which applications currently handle these problems best?

2. OCR accuracy versus document structure

Recognizing individual words is only part of the problem.

A useful digital book also needs to preserve:

- Paragraph boundaries and reading order
- Headings and chapter structure
- Italics and other text formatting
- Footnotes and references
- Tables, formulas, and illustrations
- Vertical Chinese and Japanese text

I've noticed that modern OCR and vision-language models can produce impressive text recognition results, but preserving the original document structure remains an interesting challenge.

3. Searchable PDF versus reflowable EPUB

A searchable PDF preserves the original appearance of the printed pages.

A reflowable EPUB can be much more comfortable on smaller e-readers, but converting complex layouts often introduces errors.

Would you prefer a workflow that produces both formats from the same scanned source?

4. Processing an entire book efficiently

Scanning a few pages is relatively easy.

But processing a book with 300–500 pages raises additional questions:

- Can page order and numbering be maintained automatically?
- Can missing or duplicated pages be detected?
- Can the final file size be reduced without damaging readability?
- Can OCR results be checked against the original images efficiently?
- How much manual correction is still necessary?

5. An integrated workflow versus multiple applications

This is perhaps the question I'm most interested in.

Many existing workflows involve several separate tools for image processing, OCR, PDF creation, EPUB conversion, and proofreading.

Would it be more useful to have these capabilities integrated into a single application, or do you prefer specialized tools for each stage?

I'd love to hear from members who regularly digitize printed books.

In your experience:

What is the single most frustrating or time-consuming part of turning smartphone photographs into a high-quality, searchable, readable e-book?

And have you found any software that handles most of the process particularly well?

Thanks for sharing your experiences!