Turn your print books into eBooks FOR FREE using just an iPhone and Google Docs
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- Опубліковано 6 кві 2020
- This video shows you a quick, easy, and free way of turning your print books into eBooks.
Step one: Set up or find an area of good lighting and use the camera on your phone to scan in the book, two pages at a time. (The iPhone does this easily through Notes - Scan Document, Android users also have plenty of app options including the Google Drive app with an inbuilt scanner.) A good clear scan really helps, blurry or dimly lit pages will work but have more errors.
Step two: Upload the .pdf to Google Docs and select Open With - Google Docs. You'll see a conversion window while the optical character recognition - OCR - takes the photographs from the .pdf and uses software to convert them into editable text.
Step three: There is no step three, you're done! From here on, all you have to do is select File - Download - EPUB and you have an ebook file. However, it'll have some conversation mistakes. Making the quick tweaks in the video - text alignment, size, and so on - will help a lot in just a few seconds. If you want a higher quality result without much more work, keep reading.
Optional step four: Calibre (a free, open-source program that runs on multiple operating systems) has been around forever and is a great eBook editing and conversion tool. [Note: I have no affiliation with them, I've just used it for years, as have many others, it's very popular and powerful.] Download the Google Doc you just created as a Microsoft Word file (File - Download - .docx), then drag and drop it into Calibre. Hit "Convert" with default settings and an ePub output. My resulting file had no artificial spacing errors, compared to the Google Docs version which had dozens. I then put in the ISBN identifier of the book to let Calibre download all of the metadata and search for and add cover art as well (though I ultimately used my own image). And voila - you now have your own high quality eBook with cover art to read on your phone, Kindle, or iPad.
Standalone OCR applications cost hundreds of dollars and are out of reach for most casual users, while scanning services cost $20+ per book and often destroy your original (I've used those myself), so I hope you enjoy this walkthrough. Please comment below if this helped you or with any questions. Thanks!
I hate when I’m trying to find out how to do something and i have to watch a 30 minute video of someone taking forever to get to the point bc they keep rambling on and on. This video was straight to the point and showed me exactly what i needed in just 5 minutes. Thank you! Great video!
It was probably the best 'How to' UA-cam video I have come across. You have saved me $$$.
Thank you! I'm glad it helped!
@@lifetourer5009 , a great help indeed. It is going to help in digitising some rare texts on Indian philosophy and metaphysics. The only limitation is that 'Notes' does not allow more than 25 pages to be scanned in one document, so I would need to merge sets of 25 scans later, which is doable.
could use sheet of glass/plexi put on top to hold flat....er. But glare may be issue
I find that using Microsoft lens (iPhone or Android) and exporting the pdf into calibre gives me the best ebook. Calibre ocr seems way more accurate as far as my experiments went. for some reason calibre would only ocr pdfs produced by office lens. I used the document filter.
with calibre, convert pdf. heuristics on, linebreak .2, delete blank lines after/ before paragraph, absolutely no images on pdf.
even using my old nexus 5 hand held I get results that are very good
Thanks for that tip
Great Job brother.
Does this work with books in a different language? Especially if the pages open from right to left instead of the traditional left to right we have with the English language.
Thanks so much
Intresting and different, super☺🙏👏👏👏👏👏👌
I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Can you explain, how can I upload the Photo, to Google Docs? I've red the distribution box, still I don't got it. Do I have to download the Google Docs on my phone to upload all the picture I scanned ? Thank you.
Try going to drive.google.com, then upload your pdf there and open it with Google Docs. Remember, you want a pdf file, not actual photos - this is why you use Notes to scan versus just taking pictures with the camera.
Can I send the scanned items from my phone straight to my Mac then edit it to ebook using calibre app?
Not directly, without using Google Drive in between as described in the video: it's doing the optical character recognition for free (converting a pdf, a series of pictures of text, into actual typed text that's editable). Most OCR solutions that can be installed on your computer, like Adobe Acrobat, must be purchased. Once Google Drive has done the OCR, then you can edit it in Calibre on your Mac and export to ebook.
There’s got to be an AI (GPT-chat something) that can do a really good job of converting the text from OCR to Word without so many massive character mistakes or bad spacing. Anyone found anything like that?
I was thinking the same thing! If not it'll come soon I have no doubt
Google translate
What’s the official website for caliber ?? And how would I find the exact website or app you used ??
Calibre is free, open source and cross platform, their download link is on their website here: calibre-ebook.com/download
Otherwise the only apps you have to use are the camera and Notes on your phone, and Google Docs.
Thanks a bunch, I do alot of Research about my people & our beliefs, Which means most of the books i end up owning are typically hundreds of years old. Which means they are usualy falling apart or will if i open them enough times. I remember about 10 years ago seeing a stick like instrument that you could use to slowly go over the surface & scan it. But those cost alot of money from what i saw. But Originally i was just taking pictures of each page but it was a hassel to rearrange them in a pdf maker after wards. Ayo, Hawwah Great Spirit Bless.
Man please please please I need ur help ..after I’m done editing on google docx ..it’s doesn’t keep everything as I edited it like the pages and stuff it moves it around
Like what I mean when I download the edited google docx ad a pdf file everything stays arranged the same way but when I convert to pdf either with google docx or calibre ..words don’t stay on pages…it’s as if a page break doesn’t exist and I have no idea how to do this for epub conversion …does google docx have some sort of feature that forces items into pages and not to flow freely when converting to epub
Is there a link on where I can buy the same light box and lights??
This one’s no longer sold, unfortunately. You can search for “photo light box” and see some similar, folding options. Most have LEDs in the top now, so you’d have to have a stand for the book and shoot it from the front, vs. top-down.
What if do not possess an I phone or the likes?
Which app u unused for scanning?
Notes on iphone
Can’t I use my internal pages from my editor?
Do you mean if you already have text files you want to convert into an eBook? Yes, Google Docs can do that, but I'd suggest Calibre as the better program for formatting and conversion. The beauty of the free OCR in Google Docs is in turning images into searchable, copy and paste text.
Can this be made kindle compatible?
Yes! epubs will work on Kindle, or you can save to their own format.
Can I do this with an iPad?
Yes, you can, same steps. Calibre doesn't have an iOS version, however, so you'd be limited to using the version that Google generates without error cleanup.
Can you make money doing this legally with copyright issues?
For fair use only not for redistribution or sell. He would be bootlegging books converting them to ebooks that’s illegal for sale. For fair use only.
Can you sell the ebook once you’re done
Upload it so the next generation doesn’t have to buy the physical version
obviously the rights remain with the author/publisher