When six or seven years ago I discovered for the first time the comfortable world of eBook one of the major problems that afflicted him was the lack of titles, mostly in Italian. There were already several online store with a good catalog of texts in English, but electronic books in our language were not many, and if you wanted a text a little ‘less famous you ended up not finding it. Then I had an idea, which at first seemed brilliant: I’d created by me the digital version of my favorite stocks , I already had on paper, in order to read comfortably on the device I used to ‘period for this purpose, which incidentally were not true eReader but only the firs t models of MP4 players that included functionality for reading texts.
Well, after I armed with special programs for recognition and digitization of characters , of my trust and unfortunately now defunct scanner and a good paper book I began the experiment. The result? After about a hundred pages totally passed me the desire and revalue the initial idea downgraded from bright to “ is smart but does not .”
Now you’re probably wondering why this bizarre premise, simple: a few days ago Amazon is selling a new software for the digitization of printed text, Kindel Converter for PC . This application, like several other of different developers already available for some time, makes it possible to transform scans the pages of their books into real books. One of its most interesting software branded Kindle, according to the statement from Amazon itself, is also able to recognize and save handwritten notes , autographs, dedications and images: in short, all those elements that embellish hard copies of their favorite books. On some forums and on some site I read the news date with a pretty outsized enthusiasm and little contextualized, in my way of seeing things.
As mentioned before Kindle Converter for PC is not in fact the first software conversion with OCR circulating on the market. I do not know if it is the best, because I have not had a way to test it first-hand, but there is one thing I know: the time and effort that costs digitize an entire volume, even a tome not very big for a couple of hundred pages, is according to my personal experience much greater than the monetary cost which generally has the eBook version of the same volume. This application therefore should not be seen as a way to carry your library in digital, or at least not as a convenient way nor free, since the software retails for $ 49 . It is much more likely to be an application designed to create an electronic copy – and then in a certain way to save wear of time – of all those still not very common or rare volumes which do not yet exist a version book, which can be between the shelve s of avid readers.
I say this because, as the software of Amazon can be well studied, and I repeat that I do not know if this is so because I have not yet tested by hand, what committed the most time is the scanning process itself , especially if performed with a common household scanner. To get good results with the automatic character recognition must in fact run scans with a value high enough to DPI, which in itself takes time. Then we should not underestimate the whole operation to open the scanner cover, turn the page and put the book, that may seem trivial but when it should be done two or three hundred times is long and also quite boring, to unless you automate this with a special machine homebuilt for scanning texts, such as those made by fans of the site DIY Book Scanner.
Some of you have already tried the new application from Amazon or other similar? I end up at the time I was able to create my digital copy of a manual only, about two hundred pages long, which I could not find a digital version and I wanted to keep an electronic copy because to me very useful and expensive. For all other books are always appeal to the English version or simply I settled the always excellent reading in print, you?
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