The electronic books or eBooks have gained widespread popularity, offering a convenient, portable and versatile alternative to traditional physical books. It allows you to have an entire library with thousands of books in the palm of your hand, and take knowledge and reading wherever you want. However, we all have many physical books, in paper format, at home, and perhaps we are interested in converting them into eBooks.
Digitizing books can have many advantages, such as being able to store and copy them so as not to lose them, or to be able to access them wherever you are, as well how to convert them into the format you wantTherefore, it is interesting to know that there are several ways to convert physical books to digital format, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Could you have legal problems?
First of all, you should know the possible consequences of converting between a physical book to a digital format or eBook. In general, Converting a physical book to digital format for personal use does not usually have legal problems. However, there are some exceptions and aspects that you should consider to avoid infringing copyright and ending up committing a crime.
The law of intellectual property allows the reproduction of works protected by copyright for private use, without the need for authorization from the author or rights holder. This means you can convert a physical book to a digital format to read on your personal electronic devices.
However, It is strictly prohibited to distribute or make digital copies available to third parties. of a book without the authorization of the copyright holder. This includes sharing files, selling unauthorized eBooks, or uploading them to the internet, even if you do so for non-profit, for which you could face penalties.
There are some exceptions, such as works entering the public domain, that is, they are no longer protected by copyright, between 70 and 100 years after the death of the author, depending on the legislation of each country. In this case, you can freely convert and distribute the works without infringing copyright. But be careful, since there may be some cases in which a family member of the author or some entity has become the owner of the rights and has renewed them, so it will continue to be protected.
Some works are under Creative Commons licenses, this is another of the exceptions, and they allow its use and distribution under certain conditions, such as attribution of authorship or non-commercial use. You should check the specific license for the work before converting it to digital format. Some symbols or codes will show what can and cannot be done.
Generally, you should take a good look at the entire work, as some may be under conditions that would allow it to be distributed, but some of the content may be copyrighted or under other conditions, such as some images, etc. So, for Do not fall into crimes, it is better to only copy the works for private use, as a backup.
How to convert from book to eBook
Now that you know the possible consequences, since on this blog we do not encourage piracy, the next thing is to know what they are. all the options you have available to convert a book to an eBook:
Scan book
The multifunction devices or conventional scanners They can be an alternative to convert a book to an eBook, since many of the software they include allow it to be converted to PDF format, or even to a text document with OCR recognition so you can edit it if you want, or make conversions to other formats with Caliber. The problem is that it is very uncomfortable, because you have to open the pages of the book wide and even apply pressure so that the entire page is scanned.
However, There are book scanners, they are specialized devices designed to digitize books quickly and efficiently.. They work by capturing images of each page of the book and converting them into digital files, usually in PDF or JPG format. There are several types, the most comfortable and professional are these:
Or there are also manual ones, so that you slide the scanner along the page to be digitized, although in this case it is somewhat more complicated to do it at the appropriate speed, having to move page by page, etc., but they can be good for carrying out where you need to digitize books:
Thanks to these scanners, you can convert the book to an eBook quickly and accurately, although obviously, if it is a book with hundreds or thousands of pages, it will take longer. In addition, they achieve very good resolutions, and many include OCR functions to recognize the text and create an editable document. But, as I said, they also have a high cost that will not be worth it if you are only going to digitize a few books...
More about the possible formats to save your books
Manual digitizing
If you have enough time and are good at typing, for small works, you can also convert it to digital format yourself. There are some services where they can help you with larger collections, you can choose to hire professional digitization services, although you may not be allowed to do so with copyrighted works. These companies have specialized equipment and trained personnel to digitize books accurately and efficiently.
The advantages of this other service is its high quality as it is carried out by professionals, although you can also do it at home with high quality, if you master text editing and layout software. In addition, some of the digitization services also have the possibility of correcting errors if there are any and even translating them into other languages if necessary. The final result will be an eBook or editable format. Obviously, if you do it yourself it will mean spending many hours, and if you hire a service, they are not usually cheap...
Mobile app with OCR
Another alternative is to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software can convert scanned images into editable text. This allows you to convert your physical books to editable eBook formats that you can modify, cut parts of the text, among other things. The positive thing is that currently you will not only depend on a computer, scanner and OCR software, since mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, have apps with this type of technology and cameras that can also be used as improvised scanners. By photographing the book page, it can be quickly digitized, both as an editable document and as a PDF.
Again, although it is a cheap option and available to everyone, the truth is that it involves spending time scanning all the photos, and it can be somewhat problematic if you are in a room with inadequate lighting, or perhaps if you do not have good pulse, the page does not appear as you expect and you have to repeat.