How to create your own e-book
By Shailesh Kushwaha - Monday, May 28, 2012
Books are a necessity for
students and for working professionals. There’s no way of avoiding the PDF
format. Paper might be the best medium but the ease of eBooks makes it worth
the switch. A lot of us are busy and need our huge collection of books with us
while travelling. eBooks make it possible. There are plenty of eBook readers and
we’ve seen plenty more at CES this year. But what if you wanted your text
books, journals, etc in the eBook format? There’s only
one way – make your own !
All you need really is a scanner and if you don’t,
a camera will do just fine. The software required for the process is all
available for free. Theoretical books are best converted to PDFs. With diagrams
and pictures, things become very complicated for free OCR software and it can
get cumbersome. The only simple solution you have is Adobe Acrobat Professional. It would be simple
to use just images as PDFs but then each eBook would cross a couple of hundred
megabytes each. We’ll use free OCR software to convert these images into text. FreeOCR
(www.freeocr.net) is one of the simplest and cheapest alternatives to
expensive packages such as Adobe Acrobat Professional. Download and install the
program while you’re connected to the internet. The installer downloads some
packages during the installation process.
Step 1 : From paper to the screen
FreeOCR allows pages to be scanned directly into
it. Place the book spread on the flatbed scanner and close the scanner top. Set the
scan settings to black and white if possible. Make sure there is no dirt or
complicated patterns on the screen. In the FreeOCR window, clear the sample text
by clicking on the Clear Text Window button at the center of the window. Then,
click on Scan. FreeOCR might ask you to select your scanner if you have many
devices connected to the PC.
 |
| Converting of images and scanned pages into simple text in FreeOCR |
If you don’t have a scanner, a decent camera will
do. Click photos of the pages straight down and with as little page-folding as
possible. Click all the photos in a sequence and you remember the first photo
of the sequence.
Step 2 : Images to text
Once you have all the pages scanned and properly
named on your drive, it’s time to start converting them to text. But first, you
need to select the region you want to convert to text.
PDFCreator creates
PDFs out of pretty much everything you normally print
You wouldn’t want the page
numbers, the page titles to come in between the text. There is a selection tool
in the left toolbar. Click it and choose the area of the page you want
converted to text.
Once that’s done, click the OCR button. The text
should convert to plain text in the window on the right. OCR software aren’t
good at detecting line breaks, so we need to get rid of them so the text flows
well as a paragraph. Click on the Text menu and click Remove Line Breaks. This
saves you the effort of manually removing every line break in the scanned text.
FreeOCR will remove all of the line breaks. Browse through the text to find any
spelling mistakes and hyphens or other special characters. Follow the same
steps for all the pages you need to scan.
Step 3 : Text to eBooks
Once the text is finalised,
it’s time to copy it to a word processor to fine tune and format the text.
Click on the Word icon and a new word document will be opened with the text in
it. If you are using any other word processor or page layout utility, you can
simply copy and paste the text to it. PDF has become a standard for eBooks because
of the way it looks. Fonts look smoother and you can resize without degrading
the quality. The file size is also small which makes it portable. We’ll use a
free PDF creator called PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/)
to convert our plain text files into PDFs. Once installed, use the word
processor or layout software to print the pages/book. PDFCreator makes a
virtual printer that outputs PDF files to the disk. Select this PDFCreator printer.
You’ll be prompted to enter details for the PDF being created. You can also
change the compression settings for to reduce file size.
And that’s it. You have your
eBook PDF ready. You can carry it everywhere you go – your netbook or your
mobile – and since ebook readers are rapidly gaining popularity, even on your eBook
reader.
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