Scan and digitize books - the best tips
There are many formats and options for scanning and digitizing books. You can combine the scans into a single PDF file and create a fully-fledged e-book using text recognition. Or you can create an e-book file optimized for your Kindle. This practical tip shows you what you should pay attention to when scanning and how to prepare the scans correctly.
Scan books: These scanners are available
Note: Be careful not to violate copyright law with the digital copy of the book.
- The most common are flatbed scanners, which are by far the least expensive to buy.
- Place the book on the scan glass and close the cover as far as possible with little effort. If necessary, press the cover a little harder when scanning, so that the text in the middle of the double pages is also scanned with no curvature.
- In special practical tips, we will show you how to properly scan with widely used scanner software such as Nuance PaperPortGoogle Drive and HP Solution Center.
- Another method is to photograph a book. We explain in a practical tip how to scan, edit and search documents with scan me. In another practical tip, we will introduce you to other document scanning apps.
Settings when scanning books
No matter which type of scanner you use to scan your book and how you want to continue using the scans, always use the following settings:
- It is best to scan pure text in black and white (SW). On the first page, try out which brightness leads to the sharpest text.
- Scan grayscale images in grayscale too. If necessary, adjust the brightness and contrast here.
- It is best to scan text at 300 to 400 DPI. A lower resolution worsens later text recognition, a higher resolution leads to very large image files.
- GIF, TIF, PNG and PDF are the best file formats for text. Here the color of each pixel can be coded with just one bit. This keeps the files small even at high resolution.
- BMP files are not optimal because the file size is very large. JPG is unsuitable for text, since the lossy compression softens the contrasts of the font and makes later text recognition more difficult.
- If the scanner is capable of auto-cropping, activate this function. Then the scanner automatically cuts the scan area so that only the book pages are actually scanned.
- If you value it and bring a lot of time and patience, you can retouch the scanned thumbs and margins with image processing software such as Paint.NET or Gimp.
Create PDF e-book from scans
In order to save, search, copy, send and print the digitized book on the PC, you should generate a PDF. With automatic text recognition, you also save the text in the file for the pure image data. How to create your e-book:
- With PDFill PDF Tools you can combine any number of image files in a single PDF file under point 9. "Convert Images to PDF".
- If you have already scanned the book pages as PDF files, you can combine them under point 1. "Merge PDF Files".
- Alternatively, you can also convert image files to PDF online and merge PDF files online. For this you need patience and a fast internet connection.
- We will explain in another practical tip how you can merge PDF files on a Mac.
- Next, you should apply automatic text recognition to the PDF. You can do this easily in the free ORC or with the PDF-XChange Viewer, using the "OCR" (optical character recognition) option.
- If you don't want to use any extra software, use PDF-XChange portable, use the online PDF converter OnlineORC.net or the ORC from Google Drive.
- Once the text has been recognized and saved in the PDF file, you can, for example, search for words in the PDF files or even search a whole collection of PDF files for keywords.
Convert the scanned book to the Kindle e-book
Read e-books on Kindle rather than print them out or on a bright monitor, convert your scanned book into Kindle format with ease:
- In principle, you can read all PDF files on your Kindle. However, this is uncomfortable because a few zoom levels can be set and many options are not available.
- With the EBook.Online-Converter you can convert your PDF including the recognized text into a MOBI file for your Kindle online.
- With the software Caliber you can convert EPUB to MOBI and read PDF files on the go.
- If you would prefer an EPUB file, you can also do this with Caliber and the help of this manual.
