# Has anyone used One Dollar Scans?



## cleee (May 15, 2009)

First, let me say that I had never heard of One Dollar Scans until a teacher I know told me that he uses it on occasion. He buys a textbook that he evaluates for use in his classes but would rather read it on his Kindle so he sends the book to that service. They scan the book into electronic form and then destroy the book. He then downloads the book from his account there. I thought this was totally illegal but it turns out that it is not and the service has been written about in Forbes and other known publications and web sites.

I have nothing to do with them but am thrilled! I have about ten hard cover books and a bunch of paperbacks from the 80s that will probably never be available for Kindle so I'm thinking of sending them in. It's a dollar per 100 pages and you round up, so to have an e-version of a 250 page book would be three bucks!

Has anyone ever sent anything there?


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## Lee (Nov 7, 2008)

It looks interesting, but it appears the resulting e-book is in pdf format, which I find is not too pleasant to read on a Kindle.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

cleee said:


> First, let me say that I had never heard of One Dollar Scans until a teacher I know told me that he uses it on occasion. He buys a textbook that he evaluates for use in his classes but would rather read it on his Kindle so he sends the book to that service. They scan the book into electronic form and then destroy the book. He then downloads the book from his account there. I thought this was totally illegal but it turns out that it is not and the service has been written about in Forbes and other known publications and web sites.
> 
> I have nothing to do with them but am thrilled! I have about ten hard cover books and a bunch of paperbacks from the 80s that will probably never be available for Kindle so I'm thinking of sending them in. It's a dollar per 100 pages and you round up, so to have an e-version of a 250 page book would be three bucks!
> 
> Has anyone ever sent anything there?


I think there was some discussion about this service early in kboards history. . . . . the biggest drawback to me is that the scanning destroys the book.  Most paper books that I have, that I might like to also have in kindle, well, I still want the paper copies. So it's a non-starter for me.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Ann in Arlington said:


> I think there was some discussion about this service early in kboards history. . . . . the biggest drawback to me is that the scanning destroys the book.  Most paper books that I have, that I might like to also have in kindle, well, I still want the paper copies. So it's a non-starter for me.


You have to buy a second, sacrificial copy.


Betsy


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> You have to buy a second, sacrificial copy.
> 
> 
> Betsy


Yeah. . . I guess so!


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Perhaps it's a plot by the publishers to get us to buy twice as many books.


Betsy


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

Ha. I was looking at Amazon for sacrificial copies of some of them and I can indeed get them for as little as a penny but...

I downloaded their sample book and it's not readable on the Paperwhite. The picture on their site of a pdf on a Kindle with a keyboard looks perfectly fine to read (no surprise there) but it definitely does not match what shows up on the Paperwhite. I would have to read them on the Fire so that takes some of the fun away. Still thinking about doing it for some books though.


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

I'm going to use this.  There are some cheesy horror books from the 80s that I read as a kid and I would like to reread them.

I don't think the PDF is a big deal.  You can use calibre to convert or worst case edit the PDF and dump the text into a txt file and convert from there.  The biggest thing is to get the book into a file.

I will post my results.  Going to order the two sacrificial books this week.


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## alicepattinson (Jan 27, 2013)

Me too, this is the 1st time I've heard of One Dollar Scans


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## metal134 (Sep 2, 2010)

If you had your own scanner, you could probably do this without destroying the book.  It would time consuming, but probably worth it in order to keep the physical copy.  I have a scanner and have been wanting to try this with some of my books (scanning myself, that is).


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

metal134 said:


> If you had your own scanner, you could probably do this without destroying the book. It would time consuming, but probably worth it in order to keep the physical copy. I have a scanner and have been wanting to try this with some of my books (scanning myself, that is).


Maybe. . . but I'm guessing you'd get better images if you unbind the pages and can lay them flat. I expect that's what they do which is why the book ends up destroyed. Presumably they have some labor saving machine so you don't have to place the page, scan it, flip it, scan it, next page, etc. etc. etc. which would be mind numbing!


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## Adaman14 (Mar 20, 2013)

There are scanners that scan both sides of a page and use a sheet feeder. Here is a video of a do-it-yourself book scan process that I found entertaining:






He uses a Fujitsu Scan Snap to scan about 50 pages at a time. They cost upwards of $450 if I remember correctly.


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## BradW (Sep 6, 2012)

I've done a few book scans with just my all-in-one printer/scanner and Microsoft Office 2003.  Office includes a Document Scanner tool that does OCR.

The proof-reading pass is what takes the most time, although there are many common mis-OCRs that search & replace can handle.

Overall, between scanning, proofing, adding chapter headings and TOC, I managed about 20 pages/hour.  It isn't a quick process, but if you have paperbacks in bad shape that are out of print but you still enjoy reading, it's maybe worth it.


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## metal134 (Sep 2, 2010)

BradW said:


> I've done a few book scans with just my all-in-one printer/scanner and Microsoft Office 2003. Office includes a Document Scanner tool that does OCR.
> 
> The proof-reading pass is what takes the most time, although there are many common mis-OCRs that search & replace can handle.
> 
> Overall, between scanning, proofing, adding chapter headings and TOC, I managed about 20 pages/hour. It isn't a quick process, but if you have paperbacks in bad shape that are out of print but you still enjoy reading, it's maybe worth it.


Oh, I know what you mean. I haven't scanned my books myself, but I've gotten files of books that I'm trying to digitize and sitting there going through the file to cross check with the book for formatting and artifacts takes forever.


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## cagnes (Oct 13, 2009)

Thanks for the info, I'm going to give it a try! I just shipped them 3 old out of print paperbacks that aren't available in ebook format. I'd love to read them but detest reading paperback due to the fine print & because I'm so spoiled for reading on my PW. Hoping that they'll convert well to mobi so I can read them on my Kindle.


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

I signed up foe Platinum Lite and still shipped a book from Amazon.

From what I understand, PDF is more of an image and not a document.  They have the option to OCR it which makes it searchable.  I will likely pay for the high quality add-ons as well.

Once I get the PDF I will use Acrobat to covery to a Word doc, which again uses OCR to do so.  From there I can clean up anything in Word and then convert to mobi.

I hope it is successful as there are more books I would like to do.  I don't have a substantial amount so I don't mind paying extra for high quality, which I'm hoping will help the OCR conversion.

If it works I do plan to NEVER read a paper book again.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Interesting, those of you who try it, be sure to let us know what you think!

Betsy


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## telracs (Jul 12, 2009)

i don't know why, but every time i read the subject line, i see it as One Dollar Scams.....


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

telracs said:


> i don't know why, but every time i read the subject line, i see it as One Dollar Scams.....


It isnt a scam. I would not have posted about it had a college professor friend mentioned it when I was saying how I have so many older books that I would just love e-versions of. Apparently, services like this one are very popular in Japan.

I am going to try it as well as soon as I have some time to order sacrificial copies.


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

Just a quick mini review and update for everyone.

I signed up for their Platinum Lite account.  $15 a month for 10 sets (1000 pages) and you get some extra perks - higher priority in the queue, searchable PDF and a few other things.

I dropped shipped Jaws 2 (I know, I know, but I've always wanted to read it and needed a test book from the 80s).  It took about a week from them receiving it to them sending me an email that the pdf was ready to download.

I downloaded it and the quality is reasonable.  Keep in mind this is a paperback from the 80s I bought used from an Amazon seller.  The condition was good but like most paperbacks from the 80s, the pages are yellowed with age.  That comes through in the scanning.

I have no interest in reading a PDF on my kindle so I didn't even try.  My goal is to get it into .doc and then into .mobi

I ran it through Acrobat and exported to Word.  It took some time on my netbook (next time I will do it on my actual PC which has about 10x the power and memory) to convert.  The results left a lot to be desired.  I went through a few dozens pages and nearly ever pages had errors due to the OCR.  I believe a lot of these errors are a result of the yellowed pages which definitely reduces the clarity of the characters in the scanned PDF.

Next I tried the fine tune feature on the 1DollarScan web site.  I fine tuned it to a Kindle 4.  That basically turned it into a black and white pdf and took out some of the yellow and borders that ended up in the scan.   I redid the export but still ended up with errors.  I'm not sure which process gave me the most errors.  I did this all quickly last night before bed.

A friend of mine has some other OCR software that he raves about so we are going to give that a try tonight.  I will let you all know the results.  I believe at this point that regardless of how well the OCR goes through, I will have to go through the Word document to make fixes and edits.  My goal now is to make those fixes and edit as minimal as possible, which I'm hoping I will do so tonight with the new software.  I figure at the very least I have to go through and strip out the page numbers that came through the scan, but likely some corrections will still be needed as OCR is never 100% accurate, which is even moreso an issue with older books.  My main desire is old paperbacks from the 80s.

I'll note that I was considering paying extra for their 'high quality scan' options, but decided I'm just not going to spend that kind of cash in the future so there is really no point for me to test it.  They have two high quality scan options you can pay for.  If you do both, you are looking at an additional $4.00 per set (100 pages).  I had actually considered paying it at one point but when I emailed them to ask them how to add on these features and pay for them (you don't create an invoice if you are a platinum member - you just send the book with your account name), they did not give me a clear response.  I do have 15 days after the scan to request a rescan, but as a I said, I decided I'm not going to spend that kind of money.  If I'm going to spend that much, I'll suck it up and read the paperback.

If I can "correct" the .doc for a 300-500 page book within 1-2 hours, I will likely stick with this and start converting my books.  If not, I may throw the towel in and go back to complaining about X book not being available on the Kindle...

I will keep everyone posted.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

Ann in Arlington said:


> Maybe. . . but I'm guessing you'd get better images if you unbind the pages and can lay them flat. I expect that's what they do which is why the book ends up destroyed. Presumably they have some labor saving machine so you don't have to place the page, scan it, flip it, scan it, next page, etc. etc. etc. which would be mind numbing!


I'm curious if they actually scan each book or if it is a repeat (same book as someone else sends in) if they just email the PDF from the first one? I would but it might technically break the rules


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## Adaman14 (Mar 20, 2013)

DaveA2012 said:


> If I can "correct" the .doc for a 300-500 page book within 1-2 hours, I will likely stick with this and start converting my books. If not, I may throw the towel in and go back to complaining about X book not being available on the Kindle...


I'm sure most of the forum visitors are well acquainted with search and replace, but here are some hints.

Use Word 'search and replace' to do major format changes. For example I clean up books that have recurring page number, title, author, etc. using advanced searches such as replace "<space>, <space>, <any digit>, <any digit>" with "nothing". Explore the special characters and you can get pretty creative.

Another hint is to select a large amount of text and choose 'Spelling and Grammar' and it will walk you through successive spelling errors easier than selecting them one at a time. Just some thoughts. And please do keep us informed!


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

My friend's program was OmniPage Professional.

It's OCR worked significantly better than Acrobat's.

What it does is prompt you for any words it doesn't recognize.  And it shows the original scanned word in a blown up box, so it's very easy to correct it yourself (via the suggestion or manually typing it in if it's not in the suggested words list).

After through the OCR I dumped it into a Word file.  I am doing some manual cleanup but I suspect going through the entire 200+ pages will take 1 hour.  For now I am manually deleting page numbers, getting rid of hypens for words that were split at the right part of the page, and then deleting unused space.  It's minimal.  It sounds like there is a program to automatically do some of this for me but there are still a few errorst that slipped through, so if I'm going through all the pages anyway, we are only talking a few extra seconds for each page to delete the page number and extra line breaks out.  

I think the entire process, from OCR word prompts to my manual cleaning, is going to cost me two hours of time.  Maybe a little more.  In the end it will be worth it.  Yes that is time I could be reading but I'm having fun with it and since I'm mostly fixing formatting stuff, it's really not too bad.


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

Hey guys,

Last update...

I finished dumping the text into Word and cleaning it up last week.  I then saved it in Word to HTML.  From there I converted to epub and opened it up in sibil (ebook editor).  I went through and set the particular chapter marks.  It was finally time to READ the book!  I used Calibre again to convert to .mobi and copied it onto my Kindle.

The end result for a ~270 page book?  Pretty good!  There were occasional grammatical errors - mostly minor stuff like an extra '.' or a '-' inserted for no reason.  Very rarely - less than a dozen for the entire book - did I find a wrong word from the OCR.  I'm anal retentive, though, so I had my laptop open while I read the book and I would correct any errors in the epub.  It was pretty minimal, maybe stopping 5 times for every hour of reading to make a quick correction.  I'll also state that I used to be a person that wrote customer support articles for a company's knowledgebase; I think I'm pretty good proof reading and catching a lot of the errors.

I do think this book was a worst case scenario.  It was a book from the late 70s.  It seems to have been written on a typewriter, or typewriter-like font, and I think that caused a lot of the extra characters to be inserted.  The pages were yellowed out, too.

They just finished the second book I sent in, which is about 10 years newer than this last one, so I'm hoping it will go easier this time through.  It's also a 400+ page book.  Being easier to convert over would be nice on my limited free time.  I sent in two other books - also from the 80s.  That will be put me over my 10 sets for the month and I believe they bill me the difference.  I have decided I will keep the membership for at least a few months.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

Dave,

Thank you so much for posting your experience with the service. I am going to send in a few books next week and see what happens. I will have to get some type of OCR software if I want to read the book on Kindle though because the sample book on their website looks very blurry and is unreadable on my Kindle.

Thanks again. I will post back after I get a few files. I have a few copies of paperbacks from the 80s that I'm tempted to send, but the pages have yellowed and I fear they will look terrible. I would be willing to read them on my iPad though so it may not be that big of an issue.


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

They just finished my second book, which was a book from the 90s.  It was hardcover.  No yellowing and a much better font than Jaws 2 from the late 70s.  It converted over much easier and will require significantly less manual work on my part.  To summarize:

1)  Older books (yellowed out pages, typewriter style font, etc.) is going to take some manual editing.  Getting creative with find/replace can reduce some of the work but not all of it.

2)  Newer books (no yellowed out pages, better font, etc.) takes a lot less effort.  OCR success rate is significantly higher.

Thanks.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

I sent in about 12 books yesterday, some paperback, some harcover of various ages and conditions. If they are readable, i will be very happy. I will post back when I get the links to download them. I'm really hoping i can read them on the Paperwhite, but am wary because the sample book on their website looks very washed out and blurry on my Kindles. I will settle for pdfs on the iPad if I must. 

I am one of those people that will read one book dozens of times. Having the, available in electronic form will be wonderful.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Please keep us posted on your experiences, this is very interesting.  I keep looking at my PB copy of To Kill a Mockingbird....

Betsy


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

I will.

I went with the standard service. Their plans are somewhat convoluted to me. The only benefit to taking a monthly plan is the speed at which they will scan. I was given a scan date of May 19 when i placed the online order around May 1. They ask that if you take the basic, no monthly type that you put the order number on the outer box. I am assuming that boxes with order numbers are left on the side and given a low priority. We will see. 

I wonder why they refer to "sets" and not just say each 100 pages is a buck but rounded up. My order was for 38 sets. It just sounds weird. The boxes were scheduled for delivery today. I cannot wait to get the pdfs and see how they look. I am already looking around here for more books to send. I will post back as soon as i hear anything.


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## Jesslyn (Oct 29, 2008)

Oh my, did this bring back memories.  I used One Dollar Scan for a month.  I paid $99 for the Premium service that allowed 100 'sets' of  books--the service then was $99 per month and I figured I'd get them my books quick so I'd only have to pay one time. That theory worked like a dream--unfortunately, my scanning wasn't fixed as easily.

I recommend using the service only on newer books.  My books, unfortunately, were original pulp fiction Frank Yerby books from the 60s  (some 50s?) and quite yellow with inconsistent type and the occasional crooked page.  Despite paying for high quality, touch-ups and their other upgrades, I just ended up with huge PDF files that require (I'm not done) word by word editing in order to get into proper Kindle reading format.  

I most certainly will use their service again, but only with newer books.  Since I don't need physical copies of my books, I will stick with the Amazon direct ship method and just download and convert via Calibre.  Frankly, I can think of no better way to get non-Kindled, new condition books onto my device.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

Okay, so today I got my books back from 1dollar scan. Here is the scoop:

I did not do the monthly plan. I wanted to see what the deal was with the plain vanilla, bottom of the barrel one dollar per 100 pages gig to see what the turnaround would be. I placed the order online on May 1 and paid $38 for 38 sets (100 pages per set). The order page gave me a scanning date of May 18 and suggested I get the books to them before that date.

The FAQ says the bottom of the barrel people can wait 2-4 weeks depending on how busy they are so I wasn't expecting much. I mailed off the books around the 10th of May and they received it on May 15th. This afternoon at about 2:30 I got an email that my pdf was ready. I wasn't sure if that meant one of them was ready or all so my heart sped up and I went to my account info.

I saw all 11 files there. Since I didn't pay extra, they were just generic, long file names so I began downloading them. Holy smokes… each file whether it was a paperback or a hard cover was about 140mb in size. Very nice: 4 days after my scanning date and they were done.

Once they were downloaded I took a look and was totally impressed with the hard cover book scans. Some of the pages were slightly skewed and I'm guessing that's because when they hack off the spine, the blade probably has a slight twist when it reaches the end of the spine. I can totally live with that. One book was oddly scanned. The title page and acknowledgements were there but then the pages were reversed so it went from the acknowledgements page to the last page in the book and they moved downward from there. Luckily, some very nice person wrote a Javascript that you just into your Javascripts directory in the Adobe folder and it presents you with a Reverse option in the menu and it will reverse the pages back. Worked like a charm.

I had a hard cover from the 1980s that the pages were slightly darker than white but the page is very, very clear. The other hardbacks were the same. The paperbacks, not so much. Now mind you, I send yellowed, old, well worn paperbacks because I only care if it's readable. They are definitely readable but look toasty brown. I would venture to say that many would be unhappy with the result but it's readable so I'm very happy.

Fine Tuning: Once you get your books, you can Fine Tune them on their site for the particular device that you have. If you go the cheap route like me, you can only Fine Tune one book at a time. I did three of them and they took between 6-9 minutes each. I have Kindles and an iPad so I optimized a few for Kindle to see what I'd get. I expected nothing but bad results for Kindle. Yep. Horrible and unreadable on my Paperwhite. But that's okay with me.

I have not yet optimized any of the files for the iPad which is likely what I will read these books on. I am currently running one of the hardcovers through Acrobat OCR to see how that works out. I did the first 10 pages of one of the bad quality paperback scans and the results were actually much better than I thought so I'm going to play around with that as well. Adobe also can reduce the file size so I may try that as well. Waiting on their web site for the Fine Tuning process is a bit long. 

Overall I am DELIGHTED with this. I cannot believe I have 11 of my favorite books to read on my device. I will be sending more books to them in the very near future. 

Edited to add: I've run three books through Adobe Acrobat using OCR and then exporting them as plain text. The better quality scans of the hardbacks look terrific. One of the weathered paperbacks has gone through with fair results. Some hiccups every other page and some words without a space in between but okay with me.


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## Adaman14 (Mar 20, 2013)

cleee said:


> Okay, so today I got my books back from 1dollar scan. Here is the scoop:


Thank you for the update! I have been waiting for your results before I ordered the service.


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

I did their monthly lite plan for $15.  I mainly did it for rushed service and drop ship books;  I suspected it would be a similar turnaround time with or without the plan.  The filenames are silly - very easy to rename the file yourself.  There are some quirks here and there but I am pleased with their service.  Last month I sent in about 12 sets worth and instead of charging me the extra cost (which it states that they do in their FAQ), they waited a week until my plan reset with a fresh batch of 10 sets.  As a result, I lost 1 set (I was at 9 sets for the month).  I did chew them out for not simply charging me extra; they said they would do so next time.  I will likely stay on the subscription simply because I'm going to drop ship everything to them; that extra $5 will pay for itself in shipping savings on my end.  I have zero paperback books so I buy everything off Amazon and send to them.

The quality is good but yes it depends on the book.  I always try to buy a new copy of the book unless it is old and out of print, which is often the case I'm afraid.  My next best thing is to go the used route and look for something that is described as being in good condition.  I always try to go used hardcover first; softcover is last if no other options.  Hardcovers seem to hold up better over the years.

OCR is the way to go.  Some manual editing is to be required.  I have made significant steps in reducing my editing time.  I found another OCR program that is really quite good.  It puts the page numbers in as footers, which can easily be stripped out in Word with a few mouse strokes.  Once in Word I save to HTML and then open with sigal (ebook editor).  Sigal automatically removes hypenated words that were at the end of the lines in the books - a big help and a nice time saving step.  I'm also using sigal to mark chapters and clean stuff up a bit.  From there I convert in calibre to .mobi and I'm ready to rock.  Oh, and while I'm reading I typically have my netbook nearby to correct any little stuff I find along the way in the .epub file.  When I'm done with the book I convert again to have a 100% corrected .mobi and zip everything up for storage.

If the book is clean I find that I only have to do maybe 1-2 hours of cleanup work on a 200-300 page book.  However, with a yellowed out book from the late 70s I had to do about 4-5 hours of cleanup.  Probably too much work for most but I had fun with it.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

Update: OCR is awesome!

I ran every pdf through Acrobat Pro, OCR'd them, exported them to text and put the text files on my Kindle. There are oddities occasionally but even the most worn book is still most definitely readable and I'm very pleased.

Today I ran the .txt files through Caliber and exported them to ePub for use in iBooks. Worked like a charm. I read on the treadmill a lot using the iPad so these books are available for me there as well. I am delighted with this.

I have another bunch of books to send off to them next week.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

DaveA2012 said:


> OCR is the way to go. Some manual editing is to be required. I have made significant steps in reducing my editing time. I found another OCR program that is really quite good.


Which OCR program did you find, Dave?

Betsy


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> Which OCR program did you find, Dave?
> 
> Betsy


Sorry meant to put that in my post.

ABBYY FineReader.

I have tried Adobe, ABBYY, and Omnipage Professional.

I like ABBYY the best thus far. It has done the best job without me having to run through the 'verification' to manually correct any words it is unsure of. It is getting the highest success rate for me. However, my next book has some graphics in it so I will have to see which goes the best with images. I'm struggling with it in ABBYY right now but haven't spent much time on it.


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

For those wondering what happens when you go over 10 sets, they sent me an email indicating I went over by three sets.  They said the normal charge, given the services I have on Platinum Lite, would be about $6.00 per set but that they were willing to give me a 50% discount!  So I owed $9.00.  They asked me to confirm it was okay and then they sent a paypal invoice.

My intent is not to go over by much, but I certainly intend to use by entire 10 sets each month and if that last book pushes me over by a few sets, I will pay the difference.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

I now have all the books that I sent in in both epub for the ipad and .txt on the kindle. I was able to put in book covers as well for the epubs using calibre. I am so happy to have these books in this format. 

I mailed off over a dozen books yesterday, 77 sets still using the cheapest method (77 bucks) and have a scan date of June 8th. Once this group is done, I will have all of my favorite books on my devices. It takes some work once you get the huge pdfs but it is totally worth it.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

This morning I received the much anticipated "Your PDF is ready" email from 1dollarscan. I sent in 19 books which came to 77 sets (100 pages per set). I downloaded the pdfs today and once again, they did a terrific job.

I also learned that in Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can bulk OCR, convert and dump all of the files into a folder with no user intervention at all. I set it and forget it this morning and this evening took all the .txt files, brought them into Calibre and converted them to both ePub and Mobi and sent them to my Kindle Paperwhite and iPad mini. While in Calibre, I added the correct book cover as well.

I now have every prized book I had on the shelves on my devices and am just overjoyed. There are some snags here and there in the text but I'm not anal about it so it's fine.


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## Adaman14 (Mar 20, 2013)

Thank you for the update!  I am getting ready to do this now.  BTW, can you give some examples of the 'snags' you have from the OCR results?  Again, thanks.


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## Patricia (Dec 30, 2008)

telracs said:


> i don't know why, but every time i read the subject line, i see it as One Dollar Scams.....


Funny...I kept doing the same thing. I finally read the thread today and I find it all very interesting. I have two out-of-print books that I would love to have on my iPad mini, but I'm a little nervous about losing the hard copies if things don't turn out well. I'm not that tech savy. But I think I'm going to go for it.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

Adam,

The snags are typically hyphens that in the proper book were at the end of a line. When scanned and OCR'd to text (or other ebook format) those hyphens are no longer in the proper places. There are some books that replace an en space or em space (- or --) with the letter N or M. There are letters that get by the OCR so for example in one book, they are talking about the town of Derry and it shows up as Deny. 

Despite the condition of some of my paperbacks, I am very pleased with the results. There are some snags and inaccurate letter substitutions but anything too out of control can be fixed if it's that glaring.


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## cleee (May 15, 2009)

Patricia,

Be mindful that if you send in the books, you will receive a link to a pdf file that could be 200mb or more and will be difficult to read as is on the iPad. I have found the optimization that you can do (for free) at 1dollarscan doesn't do a very good job of making pdfs readable comfortably on the device. You'd need to run the pdf through an OCR program to extract the text and then use Calibre or some other program to convert it to ePub to get the best experience on your mini.


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## Patricia (Dec 30, 2008)

I have used Calibre and I have two adult children who could possibly help me if I can't figure it out.  And I can always come here for help.  
Did anyone use the high quality options?  Any opinion on them?


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## DaveA2012 (Jan 8, 2012)

High quality didn't help ocr process at all.  Just gave me a much larger file.


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## Adaman14 (Mar 20, 2013)

cleee

Thank you so much for the examples of the snags you describe.  These results are well within my reading tolerance and losing the hard copy of the book is not a fear anymore.  Big thumbs up for your efforts to scan and post the results!


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