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A comment on Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get a PDF via Email.

Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by caryme on Thursday August 18, 2011 @02:00PM (#2900291)
My grandmother, who passed away last week, was an author. She self-published two novels through a printer who typeset her books and printed a few hundred copies. I don't know what happened to the original text files she gave her printer and I know she never got a digital typeset copy.

I've been wanting to re-release her novels as ebooks, but haven't had a way to digitize them. This is perfect for me.

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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by caryme on Thursday August 18, 2011 @02:48PM (#2900498)
By the way, if anyone is interested, I'm also republishing my grandmother's short, inspirational writings on this blog: http://goldenwriter.caryme.com/.
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by davidw on Thursday August 18, 2011 @05:03PM (#2901067)
Ideally you'd get something besides a PDF, which is a pain in the neck to turn into a 'real' eBook.
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by caryme on Thursday August 18, 2011 @05:42PM (#2901234)
I'll probably OCR the PDF and see where I can go from there. It's a big jump start that I couldn't have easily done on my own.
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by ScottBurson on Thursday August 18, 2011 @05:45PM (#2901247)
The 1DollarScan website says they do the OCR for you. They also claim that the result is searchable, which of course it couldn't be if they didn't OCR it.
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by caryme on Thursday August 18, 2011 @05:50PM (#2901272)
I may still want to OCR it myself for more control over the process (particularly in identifying and correcting OCR errors). In my experience, there's a difference in expectation of quality between OCR to make a PDF searchable and OCR to generate a standalone text file.
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by CamperBob on Thursday August 18, 2011 @07:58PM (#2901631)
Why is that? .PDF isn't proprietary enough?
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by davidw on Friday August 19, 2011 @04:16AM (#2902647)
PDF is really a display format, whereas epub/mobi are more HTMLish in that they are not quite so specific in how they want things displayed, and thus can be flowed into different screen sizes pretty easily.
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by burgerbrain on Thursday August 18, 2011 @11:30PM (#2902117)
PDF is not proprietary.
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by jianshen on Friday August 19, 2011 @10:44AM (#2903524)
I was really hoping that the Google Books project would solve this problem for regular people. I know they take collections from public libraries and OCR them. Why not do the same for private collections?
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Re:Company Scans Your Books For a Dollar – Ship ‘Em In, Get ... by jberryman on Thursday August 18, 2011 @05:38PM (#2901217)
What a great thing to do.
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