On Monday I must go back to work, so blogging will certainly take a back seat while I get established in a new job.
I have spent much of today converting a large 600+ page book into a PDF, so that I can search it, quote from it, and work with it more conveniently. It was a long task!
I wish that academic publishers did what Amazon do with music CDs. If you buy a music CD from Amazon, Amazon make an electronic version of the tracks available to you, in MP3 format. So you can download the album to your iPhone, as well as having the hard copy. Why can’t publishers provide PDFs on a similar system?
Amazon is starting to do something of the sort with book, but you instead of a free PDF, it’s a discounted Kindle book. A step in the right direction I suppose!
Just curious. What program do you use to scan so that it ends up text-searchable instead of a non-text image? Thanks in advance.
I scan the page images in as images, then combined the images into a PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro, then use the OCR facility within Adobe Acrobat Pro to make it searchable, with the text behind the images.
If I want to “copy” a book from the library, I make photographs of them and convert them with scantailor to TIFFs, which can be converted into PDF (OCRed). Google for DIY book scanning.
Aren’t the PDFs rather large tho?
Compared to traditional scanning, the final output size is larger, at least in my working scheme. Since HD space is so cheap, I prefer to sacrifice space for quality.
But the real motives for me to do it that way are (a) it does not harm the book (compared to traditional scanning, which is not good for the spine) and (b) it is easy to set up this system at home. And it goes relatively fast as well.
I’ve had good experiences with my mobile phone camera (10mp) in libraries, I must say.