All iPads Converting textbooks into eBooks or PDF?

[troy14]

Hi everyone,

Hoping someone here with experience with this sort of thing can help me. I want to purchase a new iPad whenever they are announced (either mini or regular).

I'm a college student and carrying around 5-8 heavy books is not fun nor do they fit! Whenever I want to study or get something done if I don't have the right book it becomes real troublesome.

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge on converting physical textbooks to an eBook (ePub? PDF?) to use on an iPad? Before anyone says just scan each page in my scanner... these books are anywhere from a few hundred to 1,500+ pages... there's no way i'm doing that for all of my books.

Any better or more efficient way? Perhaps a company that does it for cheap? I will try and purchase the eBook versions in the future but that doesn't help for the books I have already bought.

Thank you!

 

[meteparozzi]

I do this for my use case (MBA program). While I have been able to find some available in PDF format, I have yet to see any in ebook format.

For me, it's a three step process. First I remove the books binding (glue, hardcover, etc.) at a local print shop. After that, I feed the books into a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300, which does high-dpi, double sided scans. It can churn through a 300 page book in about an hour. Finally I run them through a ClearScan OCR in Adobe Acrobat. Most books weigh in around 50Mb after this process. From there they go into Dropbox, which syncs with PDF Expert on my iPad and iPhone.

Once that is done, I have holes punched in the books, put them into a large 3-ring binder, and sell or gift them to other students in the same class. It usually takes 2-3 hours all told for each book.

I wouldn't have it any other way, honestly. All my notes get saved back into Dropbox, as well as highlighting etc. The files are automatically searchable and indexed, with bookmarks for chapters, etc. I will never lose my notes as long as I have the file. PDF Expert also has a 'night' mode with white-on-black text for reading in low light or other situations.

So far I've done about 30+ books this way, and they've all turned out great. I did it for my drum instruction books, as well as my chinese language books and those also turned out really well. Haven't run into any problems yet, and I've made up the difference in not losing pages, reading on the train, and constantly having any book I wanted available on the spot when I am traveling or in between work and classes.

Hope that helps!

 

[Onimusha370]

I'm hoping to do this for some maths textbooks I'll encounter at university, thanks for the info