Has anyone used a book scanning/digitization service?
I ask because I have several physical books that I would love to have digital copies of.
Most of the services out there are destructive, so you lose the book when you send it in to scan. I'm fine with this in theory, except for the fact that I'd hate to lose the physical book and have it replaced with a crappy digital copy. I've not had terribly great luck with my own attempts at OCR with documents (but I'm also not a professional).
Additionally, some of the books I want to scan have extensive footnotes. The ideal would be that the book gets scanned and edited to have these footnotes hyperlinked in the resulting ebook, but I don't know if anyone offers that kind of service. I'd even be okay with the footnotes just being eliminated if it's too much trouble. What I don't want is them just being flowed into the main text of the document.
There are a lot of different options out there, and I'm more than willing to pay for a good job. Has anyone used one of these services and can speak to their quality?
I have not, but I am curious.... are there no already digitized versions of these books out there you can simply download? Given the fact you already own a physical copy of each, IMO you wouldn't be doing anything ethically wrong by downloading even "pirated" copies of them. And at least here in Canada we have format shifting and backups exemptions for private use in our copyright laws for exactly that reason.
No, unfortunately. They're old, out-of-print books.
Ah, that makes sense. And yeah that makes it much harder, but even still they might be out there and possible to find. If you want you can PM me the names of the books and edition information and I can go hunting for them if you would like. No guarantees, but I have a bit of knack for finding incredibly obscure pirated content. ;)
Thanks for the offer, but no need to go on a hunt for me. I'm relatively certain they don't have ebooks available anywhere, partly because I myself have searched and party because they're old and domain-specific to a tech-reluctant field (teaching).
The Internet Archive might be interested in them, then. They've done similar things to what you're talking about I believe.
It looks like the Internet Archive will scan them, but they'll do it as a PDF of images. I'm hoping for something that will reformat the book into an ebook with reflowable text and fluid pagination.
If you can't find an all-in-one solution, a set of images can be converted into text via OCR. You'd probably have to edit the result to produce a clean epub but it's easier to do that than start from scratch.