Comments on: The joy of electronic books

By: Jason

Jason — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 04:40:07 +0000

I know this is a 2 and a half year old post, but I was wondering if you still had the images around somewhere. I’ve been looking into doing this for awhile myself, thanks.

By: Software is Pixels | Sealed Abstract

Software is Pixels | Sealed Abstract — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 08:14:41 +0000

[…] users. They matter to you.I’ve been on a quest to digitize everything. I’ve scanned all my books. Almost every piece of paper I interact with gets dumped into Evernote, from receipts to […]

By: Earthlark

Earthlark — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:49:42 +0000

The next step is to convert certain of those books to audiobooks so you can devour them when your eyes are elsewhere employed. Actually, I believe the Kindle will already do this for you, allowing you to pick up aurally where you left off. The voice is alright, but not wonderful. The best of the text-to-speech voices I’ve found, which I use daily, come from Ivona. Check out the British ones (Amy & Brian). I think the new American ones (Kendra & Joey) are pretty good too.

Oh, and if you want to speed up the scan process, forget the initial OCRing. Just OCR the whole folder using Acrobat’s (which comes with the the Scansnap) batch processing feature (Document > OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text In Multiple Files Using OCR).

Thanks for the good article!

By: Zelda Link's Backyard

Zelda Link's Backyard — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:59:02 +0000

With all the doggone snow we have gotten lately I am stuck inside , fortunately there is the internet, thanks for giving me something to do.

By: Drew Crawford

Drew Crawford — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:44:12 +0000

I'd like to direct you here.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:39:49 +0000

@drew Drew, your comment about time shifting is out to lunch. New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001), blew it right out of the water. Check it out. Writers own their work unless they specifically assign their copyright to someone else (e.g. a publisher). You can try and steal it if you want, but you'd better believe that's actionable.

By: Michael Nielsen » Biweekly links for 08/03/2009

Michael Nielsen » Biweekly links for 08/03/2009 — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:53:13 +0000

[…] Sealed Abstract » The joy of electronic books […]

By: Awifredo

Awifredo — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:24:23 +0000

Hi Drew, this article is awesome!!! I have just bought an Iliad Irex reader and I’m also trying to digitize all my library… I have also the Mises’ Human Action and Socialism….too much work.

I’m getting troubles with the OCR…may it does not work pretty fine in Spanish. But this is not important.

What I’m getting really troubles is with the size of the PDF files. For example, with the Third Volumen of the Stieg Larsson’s Millenium I got a PDF of 5 Mb when there is only text in the file. This book shouldn’t weight more than 1 Mb…but I cannot manage to reduce the file size.

Do you have any tricky point for this?

Thank you very much in advance…

By: Todd Noren-Hentz

Todd Noren-Hentz — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:06:59 +0000

Neat idea. If folks are looking for a shortcut that has SOME of the benefit of having all your books scanned, then try creating a “My Library” over at Google Books and you can add all your books and search them. For most books, it will give you the page number(s) where the search term was found of any book in your “My Library.” This isn’t full proof because 1) they don’t have every book and 2) some publishers restrict them from displaying the page number where the search term is found.

This does work for MOST books and doesn’t take too much time to set up.

By: Wow!

Wow! — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:10:13 +0000

[…] Wow! […]