Help: Tips & Tutorials on how to debind, seperate pages & scan a hardback book to PDF

[thebigalphamale]

Tips & Tutorials on how to debind, seperate pages & scan a hardback book to PDF???

I have a handful of books that I would like to turn into PDFs that I can use as reference when Im not at home and so I dont have to carry the hardback books around. I have a 50 page autofeeder all in one scanner and have adobe professional 8.2.0. Will this software be ok for editing and such as per my questions below or will I need other software or some better software to make compiling the digital format, table of contents or pages easier?

I did a search on here and also a google search haven't really found much for tips and tutorials on how to properly debind and separate pages from a hard/paperback book for scanning for using the auto feeder to scan. And some tips and or tutorials on keeping the file size low with the quality of the scans high (dpi settings, ocr etc?). Most are books that have color pictures.

Also, I would like to learn the easiet and best way to set up the table of contents, numbering of the pages and bookmarks properly and easily according to the way the hardback/paperback book is set up.

I dont want to take the time to flatbed scan them and know this will essentially "destroy" the book. I guess Ill put them in 3 ring binders or some other method to keep the paper version available when at home.

Thanks for reading and taking the time to help answer these questions and or link me to proper tutorials to simplify this process for a newbie!!!

thebigalphamale

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by thebigalphamale

Tips & Tutorials on how to debind, seperate pages & scan a hardback book to PDF???

I have a handful of books that I would like to turn into PDFs that I can use as reference when Im not at home and so I dont have to carry the hardback books around. I have a 50 page autofeeder all in one scanner and have adobe professional 8.2.0. Will this software be ok for editing and such as per my questions below or will I need other software or some better software to make compiling the digital format, table of contents or pages easier?

I did a search on here and also a google search haven't really found much for tips and tutorials on how to properly debind and separate pages from a hard/paperback book for scanning for using the auto feeder to scan. And some tips and or tutorials on keeping the file size low with the quality of the scans high (dpi settings, ocr etc?). Most are books that have color pictures.

Also, I would like to learn the easiet and best way to set up the table of contents, numbering of the pages and bookmarks properly and easily according to the way the hardback/paperback book is set up.

I dont want to take the time to flatbed scan them and know this will essentially "destroy" the book. I guess Ill put them in 3 ring binders or some other method to keep the paper version available when at home.

Thanks for reading and taking the time to help answer these questions and or link me to proper tutorials to simplify this process for a newbie!!!

thebigalphamale

Why not create a simple v-shaped saddle out of a cardboard box, get yourself a small sheet of matte-finish (1/8" to 1/4" thick) plexiglas and a tripod to hold up a high-resolution webcam (I've got one that shoots 5MP base and can capture up to 20MP.) and the requisite OCR software and just flip the pages of your un-separated book, putting the plexiglas on each page to take the image???

Derek

[thebigalphamale]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Why not create a simple v-shaped saddle out of a cardboard box, get yourself a small sheet of matte-finish (1/8" to 1/4" thick) plexiglas and a tripod to hold up a high-resolution webcam (I've got one that shoots 5MP base and can capture up to 20MP.) and the requisite OCR software and just flip the pages of your un-separated book, putting the plexiglas on each page to take the image???

Derek

I may give this a try.. thanks..

so far I did a quick trial run on some pages with my autofeeder after debinding an old book with a mix of color pictures and text.....

I tried scanning to 300dpi (no ocr)..both a set of scans to jpeg and pdf and the file size was 1mb to 3 mb per page. That seems very high to me. I then used advanced jpeg compressor to cut the file size down and it cut it down by 25%. But still very high. I see lots of ebooks with high quality pictures at 5-10 mb total. Im at that total with 8 pages...LOL... what am I doing wrong as the file size for a book will be easily 200-300 mb thats before ocr and such...

Also ive seen on here or on google some programs that batch correct your scans.. they line up the edges straight and maybe do other things that would be good for making the process easier...but cant seem to remember what programs or threads it was under...anyone help with that?

thanks again for reading and offering any help or tips you all may have...

[Snorkledorf]

I've been digitizing large swaths of my library for the past few months now. I use a big guillotine-type paper cutter to amputate the spines off of the books (usually manually cutting off the covers first so they don't get truncated on the side), then feed them through my ScanSnap at "Best" quality so an average hardcover-sized page comes out at about 1600 x 2600 pixels each. That's about 500KB if it's a page of text, and a book can run 50-150 MB. I save them as jpegs just so I have more flexibility in editing later, as I can always combine them into PDFs and OCR them at my leisure. Also with some books I want to run a batch transform on them in Photoshop to get rid of the page yellowing or some other repair work, and that's easier to do with individual pages.

But though I have lots of books scanned, I'm just beginning to move a few of them onto my Kindle, and I haven't yet figured out the correct PDF settings to make the files look good. PDFs that look good on screen (and are even readable on my iPod touch) often look wispy on the 16-shades-of-grey e-ink screen. Some look good, but not others. I'm assuming that adjusting the contrast will help, but haven't found the magic settings yet. Also I'm not sure if I want to shrink the file resolutions down to match the Kindle's resolution, or if I should let the Kindle resize them on the fly.

I've also been able to reduce e.g. a 50 MB book down to about 15 MB through PDF optimization settings, but without a satisfactory "before" result it's tough to decide on how far down I can go for the "after" version.

OCRing books into light .pdb files from html sources would be nicest, but that requires so much proofreading and correction that I've only done it with a handful of my favorite books so far. Joshua Tallent's "Kindle Formatting" has been very useful for those. Most books are destined to remain as images/PDFs, if I can just figure out how to display them properly on the Kindle.

My guillotine and pile of corpses:


One week's worth of spines:

[Kirtai]

You may want to check out http://www.diybookscanner.org/ which is all about building fast, efficient, camera based book scanners.

You don't even need to unbind the books