The techniques and the tools for scanning tree books and creating ebooks have evolved over the past five years since I started scanning my tree books. The scanner technology I use now is a full duplex portable scanner that I put next to my desktop and feed, a page at a time. The full duplex scanner (a Scanshell 3000D) allows both sides of the page to be scanned at once, which really speeds things up from the original half-duplex Scanshell scanners I was using. The pull-through scanner is much faster than the flatbed scanner. The disadvantage is, of course, that you have to disassemble the book in order to feed the pages into the scanner. These days, physical books have no value to me, especially since my vision has been deteriorating due to glaucoma, and my wife’s allergies. Her eyes also need the Kindle for other reasons.
The format I scan into is pdf, which is still, in my mind, the best overall format for document processing, even if it is a lousy format for ebooks because of its bloated nature. I use Adobe Acrobat to optically scan the page images (OCR, Optical Character Recognition). In my pre-Kindle days, when I was creating ebooks for the Sony PRS-500, 505, 700 ebook readers, I extracted the text to Word, designed the ebook and then rendered the pdf using the Adobe plugin in Word. This preserved the Word hyperlinks as pdf links. That worked fine for me for the Sony series. But when the Kindle arrived, with all of its compelling features (Internet access, Notes with backup, etc), I started down the path of converting all of my books to the prc format for the Kindle.
it takes about an hour to scan a 300 page, average sized book (there are a lot of variables here) and another hour to OCR, extract and create a rough ebook for the Kindle. Obviously, I’ve got the techniques down pretty good so I know how to break down the books, scan them, OCR then, extract the text and drop the text into a template quite quickly. Then there is the process of proofreading the OCR-ed text and crafting the book.
I actually enjoy the process. The scanning i multi-task by watching Italian television and movies (on the web and from my collection of avi movies) while feeding the pages. The book design process is very rewarding as the ebook takes shape and comes alive with hypertext.
You can check out some of the books I have developed for the Kindle by navigating your Kindle to:
http://cyberkindle.com
and then clicking on the CyberPoet Press links. This will present a dynamically generated list of the Kindle (prc) books that I have moved on the cyberkindle.com site. This is a site that I have just started to develop, so feel free to check it out. My plan is for this site to be entirely Kindle friendly, with links to many places … stay tuned … feedback will always be welcome. … Il Matto …
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