Turn your print books into eBooks FOR FREE using just an iPhone and Google Docs

This video shows you a quick, easy, and free way of turning your print books into eBooks.

Step one: Set up or find an area of good lighting and use the camera on your phone to scan in the book, two pages at a time. (The iPhone does this easily through Notes - Scan Document, Android users also have plenty of app options including the Google Drive app with an inbuilt scanner.) A good clear scan really helps, blurry or dimly lit pages will work but have more errors.

Step two: Upload the .pdf to Google Docs and select Open With - Google Docs. You'll see a conversion window while the optical character recognition - OCR - takes the photographs from the .pdf and uses software to convert them into editable text.

Step three: There is no step three, you're done! From here on, all you have to do is select File - Download - EPUB and you have an ebook file. However, it'll have some conversation mistakes. Making the quick tweaks in the video - text alignment, size, and so on - will help a lot in just a few seconds. If you want a higher quality result without much more work, keep reading.

Optional step four: Calibre (a free, open-source program that runs on multiple operating systems) has been around forever and is a great eBook editing and conversion tool. [Note: I have no affiliation with them, I've just used it for years, as have many others, it's very popular and powerful.] Download the Google Doc you just created as a Microsoft Word file (File - Download - .docx), then drag and drop it into Calibre. Hit "Convert" with default settings and an ePub output. My resulting file had no artificial spacing errors, compared to the Google Docs version which had dozens. I then put in the ISBN identifier of the book to let Calibre download all of the metadata and search for and add cover art as well (though I ultimately used my own image). And voila - you now have your own high quality eBook with cover art to read on your phone, Kindle, or iPad.

Standalone OCR applications cost hundreds of dollars and are out of reach for most casual users, while scanning services cost $20+ per book and often destroy your original (I've used those myself), so I hope you enjoy this walkthrough. Please comment below if this helped you or with any questions. Thanks!

Видео Turn your print books into eBooks FOR FREE using just an iPhone and Google Docs канала Lifetourer