Treebooks to ebooks ...

I have many times (hundreds, in fact) purchased books not available in the Kindle store and have become quite efficient at dissasembling/breaking down the book, scanning them to pdf, running Optical Character Recognition software (Adobe Acrobat), extracting the generated text and creating an ebook for a Kindle (html->kindlegen->prc->Kindle). Fortunately today, high density drives, portable scanners OCR software is relatively inexpensive. The most expensive part of the process of Adobe Acrobat, and as soon as I find a decent open source substitute for the scanner->ocr->pdf steps I’m all over it … Generally, when a treebook is not available as a Kindle ebook, I will buy the cheapest used treebook and break it down for scanning as soon as I receive it. Sometimes, if I want a _good_ ebook with decent hyperlink navigation (which is rare in the Kindle store, or anywhere for that matter) I will get the treebook anyway and construct the ebook the way I want it, with rich hyperlink navigation within the ebook … Each of the steps from treebook to ebook are reasonable straightforward, but there are many techniques that one has to master to bring it all together effectively, in addition to understanding the tools themselves (scanner software, OCR software, etc), and even then some books a quite simply difficult … At this point I can convert a 300 page treebook into a first draft ebook within four hours or so … then the proofreading of the OCR’ed text begins, although I have done some of that while creating the ebook … il matto …