Going Paperless - Tech Advice - Kindle Fire

Little Hare

I have a kindle

am a convert (we dont' have the fire here in australia), Its so great! I don't miss the paper version of books at all. The only thing I have a problem with here in Australia is that the publishers are giving aussies one price( ridiculously high) where as in the US the book might be half that price ;/

Scibility

Bhavana said:
I bought a Kindle Fire for my mom as a combo birthday xmas gift. We were not sure she would use it, she doesn't even have a cell phone or know how to program a VCR, and the only computer she used was at her job....but she does love to read and has been having trouble with her eyesight (macular degeneration)....so I thought that the kindle, with it's lit up screens and large font ability, would be good for her - and she LOVES IT! She is on her 4th book and plays Words With Friends (scrabble) with 4 or 5 people. I wouldn't say the kindle fire is perfect, though - but the tech support phone people have fixed any problems.

I want one too - but I know I will continue to read "real" books as well!

I had to chuckle after reading this, I was imagining your mom and her kindle playing words with friends. I'm hopelessly addicted to Scrabble. It's a sickness, and I really don't want to be cured of it

Keep an "eye" on her, that macular degeneration might be taxed to the limit if she stays on there indefinitely

Scrabble anyone? hehehe. sorry, couldn't help myself.

Scibility

gregory said:
ETA Just saw that you plan to use an auto feeder. Does it flip the pages ? If not you WILL have to do it twice - and of course, you will wreck the books. Sure you will then have a pdf. See above re scrolling etc. You can edit that if you have a pdf editor - though you shouldn't need to, as they will just be images. I have never tried to run a pdf through an OCR programme, but it is still one page at a time stuff, as far as I know, and you would lose the pagination, I suspect, unless you have the patience to go through and change the paper size till it exactly fits, and check each page as some will always have fewer lines than others and you would need to add manual page breaks, and so on....

Omnipage does appear to do this all in one now - so good luck; it isn't exactly cheap....

Gregory! Oh my goodness... Thanks so much for taking the time to type this all out! :bugeyed:

Huge huge help, because I really don't know what i'm doing, and it's all a big experiment.

You're so funny gregory. I needed a nap myself after reading how to actually do it... Ignorance is surely bliss isn't it? Oh the grand ideas we can conceive when we know nothing about what we're doing LOL.

You've saved me tons of aggravation b/c I had no idea about the greyscale issue,and I certainly didn't realize that the OCR would alter the pagination/spelling etc. (duh).

My scanner doesn't do both sides. I'm not retired, and I do have munchkins, so although I think I have the time, i'm not sure ... I really want to try this though. I'm going to maybe try a smallish book first and see what happens. I don't actually have that many personal books. I usually do a regular haunting of the library.

Thanks again so much Gregory. I'm sure the info is going to be helpful to lots of people.

Oh, BTW, if you haven't tried PDFsam
it's a terrific free little program. I use it all the time to create my own "ebooks" from bits and bobs of information I collect all over the place. I still haven't figured out how to make table of contents or anything like that, but i'm thrilled with just having the ability to access my notes as digital files.

Scibility

Aurora369 said:
I have a Kindle that I received as a Yule present and I do enjoy taking it back and forth to work instead of lugging around some of the larger books. However, that being said, I could never imagine taking a book I have apart to scan it for use with my Kindle. I do buy books for the Kindle and am using the free books apps available, but I have far too many books dealing with Tarot, Witchcraft, Herbs, etc., to even contemplate taking them apart to scan. I like going to certain books and rummaging through them to do research, etc.

Going paperless, you can just buy the e-books for the Kindle and keep the ones you already have as they are. Just my two cents.

Thanks for the feedback Aurora369. With inflation, that 2 cents was worth quite a lot more than you think

I'm sort of backpeddling just a little now. Maybe it was too ambitious now that I know what would be involved. I think i'm going to try it first and see how it goes, then maybe just do what you said from here on forward.

I was almost mortified at the thought of dismantling my books, but then I found an old book on my shelf that was falling apart, and I realized that only the portion of the paperback that is by the spine is actually glued, and taking it apaprt would be a very easy process as well as putting it back together. I don't think i'd try it with a hardcover though. That's part of where my grandiose idea originated

I thought I'd be able to just dismantle it, and drop it in the scanner and away i'd go... NOT.

Scibility

Little Hare said:
I have a kindle am a convert (we dont' have the fire here in australia), Its so great! I don't miss the paper version of books at all. The only thing I have a problem with here in Australia is that the publishers are giving aussies one price( ridiculously high) where as in the US the book might be half that price ;/

The prices on the Canadian store for hard copies are also different than in the US store, and sometimes incredibly more expensive. I can only imagine how much they charge you all the way in Australia... Not to mention the shipping :bugeyed:

It was so funny, when first using the kindle, everytime it was time to turn the page I was reaching to the corner of the kindle to flip LOL!!

old habits die HARD.

Little Hare

Scibility said:
The prices on the Canadian store for hard copies are also different than in the US store, and sometimes incredibly more expensive. I can only imagine how much they charge you all the way in Australia... Not to mention the shipping

It was so funny, when first using the kindle, everytime it was time to turn the page I was reaching to the corner of the kindle to flip LOL!! old habits die HARD.

The thing is the high prices are back firing on the publishers

there is an aussie kindle forum and there are a lot of members and as soon as people find out the price is so high. there is a mass emailing to the publishers explaining how fans won't buy the book :bugeyed:

I'd hate to be the person recieving all that email.

LOL at reaching for the corner of the page!

MountainGirl

Babalon Jones said:
I have been toying with the idea of an e-reader for awhile, but the one thing that has stopped me is that so many of the books I like aren't available yet. Also, paying 9.99 for an e-version when you can get the book itself for say, 12.99, just seems silly sometimes.

Still very tempting though!

I don't mind paying for books and I can afford them. What I can't afford is more bookshelfs and a bigger house to put them in , so that's where the Kindle is really helpful.

Blessings,
MountainGirl

Scibility

Update

Just in case anyone else was interested in trying this experiment, I did attempt it on an old out of print book that was heading for the trash. It was in really poor condition.

It took about 25 minutes total to scan approximately 300 pages in three batches.
The part that took the most time was familiarizing myself with the various software I was attempting to use. If I knew what I was doing, I think the whole process shouldn't have taken more than 1.5 hours.

Overall it was a successful project, and I would try it again. Someone with experience might look at it and think "what on earth!", but for a first attempt i'm pretty excited about the possibilities.

Thanks again Gregory for all your help. You saved me a lot of aggravation.

Additional advice I might offer:
1) I didn't do OCR, and I tried converting it to a .mobi file from a pdf. It worked, but the text enlarge feature won't work on the Kindle when doing this. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but just a warning, it may be better to just keep the document as a .PDF if you're not tech saavy.

2) also when converting the document to .mobi, when it is viewed, the pages show as alternating from one side to another with the white space reversed. Even when I cropped all the pages (in bulk), it still didn't display properly as a .mobi file. So again, keeping it as a .PDF might be easier

3) I would recommend scanning in batches of about 50 pages (front and back of each page), then checking to make sure you have all the pages before continuing.

4) I would also recommend cropping in bulk. Select all the left hand pages from the scan job, and then select the area of one of the pages that you want to crop, and your program should do ALL of them at once. Then do the same with the right hand pages.

5) if you do convert to .mobi file, the document shows up with the cover page and you can sort it etc. If you keep it as a .pdf, it will show up in your documents, and the cover image doesn't display, just the title. I don't recommend converting to .mobi unless you really know how to mess around with the various conversion options.

CAVEAT: without OCR you will not be able to search the document, and as gregory said the page numbers may not coincide with the table of contents exactly, but you can use the kindle bookmarks or notes feature to keep track of where different chapters start.

Hope this is helpful to someone else out there. Happy Scanning!

SolSionnach

Is there ANYTHING that our Gregory hasn't done?? wow, woman, you kill me...

Just a note: I LOVE LOVE LOVE emailing docs to my kindle. .rtf, .doc, .pdf, they all are easily readable and work GREAT on the regular e-ink kindle. You can't change the font size on the pdfs, but they usually are readable if you set the kindle to landscape mode.

I've made text files from some of the TdM reading threads, and I love having them with me to study away from the computer without having to print them up. I can think of some major threads (like MiShell's on shamanism) that would be wonderful cut and pasted into a text file, and uploaded to your kindle.

You get an email address (xxxxx@kindle.com) where you can email stuff to your kindle. They don't show up on kindle for mac, as far as I can tell... haven't checked on kindle for iphone yet.

Scibility, what a great resource. Love what you did. I don't have a scanner, though.

Next year, maybe (if the world doesn't end 12/21/12!)

Scibility

SolSionnach said:
Is there ANYTHING that our Gregory hasn't done?? wow, woman, you kill me...

Just a note: I LOVE LOVE LOVE emailing docs to my kindle. .rtf, .doc, .pdf, they all are easily readable and work GREAT on the regular e-ink kindle. You can't change the font size on the pdfs, but they usually are readable if you set the kindle to landscape mode.

I've made text files from some of the TdM reading threads, and I love having them with me to study away from the computer without having to print them up. I can think of some major threads (like MiShell's on shamanism) that would be wonderful cut and pasted into a text file, and uploaded to your kindle.

You get an email address (xxxxx@kindle.com) where you can email stuff to your kindle. They don't show up on kindle for mac, as far as I can tell... haven't checked on kindle for iphone yet.

Scibility, what a great resource. Love what you did. I don't have a scanner, though. Next year, maybe (if the world doesn't end 12/21/12!)

Great Tips! Thanks for sharing! I'll have to try the search function to find the thread you mentioned. This site is so extensive there are corners of it I have never even explored. Btw, LOL re: the scanner

I highly recommend having one of those too. Really glad this was helpful to you. I'm always busy doing something or the other, but I agree, I think Gregory reigns in that department