Scanning our own books for the ipad. Technological Gap?

[applesupergeek]

If you scan it in a pdf it has poor scaling performance regardless of screen size. And there's no way that I know of that you can ocr the text to epub in a straight forward way... from the little I 've read. I have a book scan and I 've used it to turn some books to pdf, but that is not sufficient.

Developers out there, take heed, a handbrake type for app for text files is now very much a requirement. All the docs, pdfs, pages files, even web archives from safari.

edit: I found this http://www.teleread.org/2009/09/16/pdf-to-epub-new-software-from-dnaml-converts-pdf-to-epub/

 

[Chupa Chupa]

If you are looking for a conversion tool check out Calibre. It's beta, but its free.

 

[mrgreen4242]

Check out diybookscanner.org and djvi.org. The first is a forum about building high sped, high quality, inexpensive bookscanners and the second is an eBook encoding format which is really slick, imo. Lacks the searchability of an ePub file (not OCR) but better compression (for books) than PDF and better scalability. There's an iPhone reader, so I assume an iPad reader won't be long coming.

 

[applesupergeek]

Thanks guys for the replies. I have a special scanner (optibook) that scans books like a charm without breaking their backs, albeit though to pdf. I am aware of the deja vu format, it's great but I think it's somewhat an anachronism since it's been around so long yet has failed to get any traction, and perhaps more importantly industry support so I would hesitate to go that way.

I was thinking more along the lines of an integrated software solution to wok with scanners that scans to epub, which is probably the most pliable and future proof format. There are a few options as a calibre but I don't think any work directly with a scanner, and there's no point I guess to go from pdf to epub, but then I guess one should probably have to go this way to have the ocr applied before converting to epub... Still I don't know why I combined scan then ocr then epub tool would be unfeasible doing away with the pdf altogether.

edit: checking out the diyscanner site, looks like some great work has been done there. kudos.

 

[gwynne]

Back in the day I used to use an OCR called Abbyy Finereader. It saved, I believe to RTF. From there I assume RTF > EPUB conversion is easy with calibre. But my ebooks are text-only with only basic rich text aspects.