Go grab a book, the first one that comes to hand. Any book will do so long as you have a book in your hand before you read on…
Now go dig out your old scanner and start copying the pages of your book one by one to your computer hard drive. How many pages are there in the book you grabbed? If you’re lucky it’ll be a light weight paper back with just a couple of hundred pages. I bet it would still take you most of the day to run it through the scanner, but that’s what Amazon want you to do.
Luckily not yet available in the UK (you’re off the hook, you can stop scanning now!), Amazon have launched Kindle Convert for the American market. They say that “Kindle Convert is a software application that allows you to convert scans of your personal books and documents into high quality Kindle books. You can convert your most treasured books, documents and keepsakes into Kindle books“.
Amazon go on to add “Kindle Convert books and documents enjoy many of the same features you love about Kindle books including adjustable text size, worry-free storage in the Amazon cloud, Whispersync of last page read, highlights and notes, and a built-in dictionary to lookup the definition of any word. Kindle Convert preserves all the things that make your books and documents unique, such as hand-written notes, autographs, photos and images. Kindle Convert books maintain the look and feel you love about your print books“.
I’m no expert so don’t know the rules on making copies of your print books but I do know a thing or two about scanning and unless you’re going to rip your book up and use an auto-document feeder it’s going to take hours to upload even one short book.
I struggle to see how this will take off, if I’m wrong please feel free to enlighten me.
3 Responses
Oh dear. I remember scanning one of my academic works, because like a tit I’d lost the damn Word file of it. It wasn’t massive but it took me an eternity. OCR is rubbish as well in my experience, it simply isn’t that good.
Perhaps they can work from Smartphone photographs?
Its still gonna take a while but not as long as scanning….
You’ve gotta wonder if Amazon will then sell the scans you have made, on their website…..