How to Digitize Books to EBooks

Turn public domain books into ebooks with OCR software.

Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) translates the text from scanned images and creates a modifiable text document. Using OCR software, it would be possible to scan in images of public domain books, or books to which you own the copyright, and have the text of that book in a document. The document can then be saved into Microsoft Word and formatted into an e-book, making it readable on an e-book reader. Additionally, there are services which will scan an entire book and produce a Word document, for a fee.

Things You'll Need

• Scanner
• OCR Software

Instructions

1. Download your choice of OCR software. There are many free OCR software choices online, or you can use Google Documents, which offers free OCR software.

2. Create digital images of the book you want to turn into an e-book by scanning the pages.

3. Use the OCR software of your choice to translate the images into text documents.

4. Check the text documents for errors. OCR is not perfect, so careful proofreading will be required. Save the completed document.

5. Format your documents to meet the e-book specifications of the e-book publisher you intend working with. A sample style guide is included in the resource section.

6. Upload your formatted document to the publisher of your choice. Your e-book is now complete.

References

• Inquisition: How to Digitize a Book
• Google: Using OCR in Google Docs

Resources

• Smashwords: The Smashwords Style Guide