Converting Books to eBooks

[Ixixly]

Hey all,

I have a stack of Training Books and other such tomes of wisdom that have been collecting dust in a family members garage for some time. I'm looking to have them converted into eBook format but am having trouble finding someone who provides a reasonable service!

The books are mainly Aviation Theory Centre and Bob Tait books with a few others as well, about 25-30 books all up, a couple I can find actual Ebook versions of available but very few. Has anyone gone to the effort of finding someone who will do this service effectively and at a reasonable cost? Most places I've found charge more than the book is worth in some cases and certainly more than I'm willing to pay to have it done! The only ones I've found so far are this mob 1DollarScan - Book Scanning Service and they seem to offer a decent service although I'll have to get them all shipped to the US.

I'm not too fussed about whether it is a Destructive or Non-Destructive process, Non-Destructive would be preferred though as I'd like to think I'll find a place to keep them permanently eventually or possibly donate them to a local flying school.

Or alternatively has anyone done it themselves? I don't particularly need OCR done on them, just a straight up scan so I have considered just chopping the spines off myself and then taking them to a scanning place to get done.

Cheers in advance for any help you lot can give me!

[fujii]

It sounds like a waste of time. Training books change so they may be of little value to new students. You may be able to sell them cheaply or give them away, otherwise save your money.

[fireflybob]

Fundamentals never change

[Ixixly]

Not going to bother with Air Law for instance, but agree with Fireflybob that the fundamentals don't change. Obviously I'm not looking to spend huge amounts so only going to bother for the right price.

[Aussie Bob]

Sorry to say, but the process of making a good conversion involves converting them to text first, then laying out the text in an acceptable format. Scanned files converted to PDF look awful.

The next problem is what you want to do with the e-books. The first thing that comes to mind is copyright. You can't sell them without permission and giving them away is also most likely a breach (of copyright).

The only cheap way of doing it yourself is getting a text scanning program and then carefully proof reading and formatting before converting to e-pub or similar. If you hire a professional the cost will equate to the many hours of work involved.

The cheapest professionals are in India, this is where I would start.

Sorry to be the messenger of doom, I am currently involved in making e-books and the hours involved are considerable.

[Ixixly]

Just looking to take the books I have now and convert them to eBooks for myself, not to sell or give away or anything like that.

I understand scanning them would certainly come out at a lesser quality than a proper eBook, thusly why everyone scans and uses OCR software to convert them into text and then into the required file format but I'm not terribly concerned about this.

The link I put in my first post seems to be the best option so far in as far as Copyright and Price are concerned, they get around it by embedding your name into the files as the owner and then shredding the actual copies and getting you to sign some forms to confirm they are yours and such. If there was an Australian company that did the same for a similar price I'd probably just do it but the cost of freight of all my books to the US is what is making me look around a bit more for a better option.

[SLFAussie]

I've been going through the process of converting (non aviation) texts into electronic format recently, and it's not especially difficult, but is time consuming.


I bought an inexpensive ($99) multifunction printer / scanner which has an automatic sheet feeder from Officeworks. It will automatically scan into PDF format. There are more expensive automatic document feed scanners (about $400) that I suspect work faster. The one that I have takes 30 pages at a time and takes about 15 minutes to scan them.


This works if you can separate the individual pages from the spine of the book, because you can feed them into the automatic document scanner. A paperback book will allow the pages to be easily separated. A hardback book will require guillotining each page to scan (and that's something that I haven't tried).


Scanning will be easy if the pages are A4 sized, because scanners are designed to manage A4 pages. For smaller pages, you might need a more specialised scanner.


I used PDF Fill (free) to re-order, insert and merge sets of pages if one page in a set failed to scan. For double-sided books I used PDFtk (also free) which will lets you interleave sets of odd and even numbered pages.


Converting to PDF format allows the converted book to be read on any device that can run Adobe Acrobat Reader, or similar, but it might be difficult to index for searching for words or phrases in the document.


EBook readers like the Amazon Kindle provide a better experience for reading text, but require optical character recognition (OCR). Unless you pay for a professional OCR package, images won't be incorporated into the final text.


Mods - might this topic might be better placed in the Computer/Internet Issues & Troubleshooting (http://www.pprune.org/computer-internet-issues-troubleshooting-46/) forum?

[SLFAussie]

To expand on my previous post (which took an hour to write because of interruptions!) - the automatic conversion to PDF gave quite acceptable print quality where the source document was good quality. Some of my scans were of very old photocopies, so not so great, but perfectly legible. The added bonus with the software embedded in the multifunction scanner was that it did a degree of OCR that allows words to be searched for using Adobe Acrobat Reader

[Ixixly]

Thanks SLFAussie, I had assumed that doing it myself it might not come out so well, I certainly wouldn't want to destroy the books if I couldn't get decent copies but it sounds like it might be achievable so I'll look into a bit more.

[Hasherucf]

All you need to know

http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/