How to Convert a Book to an Electronic Format
- 1). Purchase and install a good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. One popular one is OmniPage Pro.
- 2). Connect a scanner to your computer and turn it on.
- 3). Place the book you want to convert on the scanner. It should be opened to the first page. Make sure the page is as flat as possible against the surface, but be careful not to damage the spine of the book.
- 4). Start the OmniPage Pro application. In the dialog that opens, set the program to process the scanned page as text, or as text and pictures if it has both. Now click "Scan." The program will scan the book and read the text. Repeat this with other pages. OmniPage will create a multi-page document as you work.
- 5). Save your completed pages in a format your word processor will recognize, such as RTF. Then open the document in your word processor and proofread it.
- 6). Export the document from your word processor as a PDF document. In the export options, choose the appearance and layout of the document. Decide whether you want to password encode the document and, if so, what the password will be. You now have a book in digital format that can be placed on the web for download.
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