Draft 1 as of 10.08.13
The first step in creating your own eBook is to scan and digitize each page of it into an image file, a digital image file, stored on your computer.The optional second step is to convert the image files into ordinary word-processed files or ordinary web pages.
Below are some over-simplified ways to digitize books at home or in a small school or in a small school district. They are time consuming and somewhat "labor intensive". Another draw-back is that the "better" hardware and software to do this type of scanning can be expensive for individuals with little income or for poor schools and poor school districts.
Remember that once scanned, you and your students can read the scanned image (digital) files on the monitor screen of a computer. Also they can read them as web-published image-files provided by your internal Intranet web-page serving computer (a.k.a. web server). However, the scanned digital files will take up a lot of hard-disk storage space.
If your Intranet bandwidth (speed at which digital data travels from one physical place to another) is slow, each requested image file may "load" onto the end-user's computer very slowly. That slowness is more likely to be frustrating for your end-users, the students. Why not just turn the page of the hard-bound or paper-back book instead? However, the answer to that is to re-print the book pages on paper, "bind" the reprinted pages in some way, and distribute the paper copies to the students. This reprinting process is being done out of mini-vans which travel from village to village in developing countries.
With "optical character recognition software", you can input the scanned image files into the OCR software and have the OCR software output text-and-graphics files in one of several popular kinds of word-processing file formats. However, the word-processing files will need proof-reading, some editing, and possibly some page-reformatting to make everything on a page look "almost as neat and readable" as were the pages of the source print-on-paper book. Way
Simplest Way 1?:turn each page of the book and scan the open pages one-by-one.
- Buy a new or used black-and-white or preferably color desktop flat-bed scanner. The scanner will come with scanning software. You must connect the scanner to a computer (desktop or laptop) and install the scanning software.
- Open the book to a page, place the opened-book on the scanner, in the scanning software click on the command which causes the scanner to scan the page (or the opened two pages) of the open book.
- Turn the page and do the same thing again from the front cover to the back cover of the book, copying every page of the book.
- If you set the automatic file "page numbering" feature of your scanning software correctly, you should now have digital image files with file names having the same page numbers as the book pages. E.g. MyBook-Chapter01-Page030.tiff.
Faster Way 1?:Sacrifice the book and use an automatic document feeder attached to a scanner.
- Very neatly cut the binding and cover off of the book. All the pages of the book should now be loose, individual pages with at least three sides of a page very "square" (corners are at right angles and the edges of the pages perfectly straight).
- Attach automatic document feeder to your scanner, unless you found a scanner that already has one.
- Place, say, 10 or 20 pages of the book into the document feeder, click-on the "scan" button of your scanning software, let the scanner scan all 10-20 pages -- on one side only -- in a very few minutes.
- Flip the 10-20 pages over, place them into the document feeder, reset the page-numbering in the scanner software, click-on the "scan button of your scanning software, let the scanner scan all 10-20 pages -- on the opposite sides of each page.
- Repeat steps 2-4 for the next "batch" of single pages from the book (e.g. for the next 10-20 pages) until all book pages are scanned and all page numbers on the scanned digital files correctly match the paper page numbers of the book's pages.
