Kindle Convert Turns Physical Books Digital
From the Kindle to the Fire TV, few companies are as good as Amazon at pioneering very convenient, but expensive, technologies to replace very inconvenient, but cheap, ones. Kindle Convert, a bit of unusual scanning software, is the latest example of Amazon's innovations. It can convert your physical books to a digital format, provided that you're willing to dish out a bit of money and bring your own scanner.
Kindle Convert just became available at Amazon, and while it usually costs $49, interested users can pick it up at $19 as an introductory offer. It's a rather lightweight program at only 36 MB, and based on the screenshots, it focuses on doing only a few things well rather than offering an entire eBook suite.
MORE: 10 Best eBook Reader Apps
Here's how it works: You use a high-quality scanner (300-600 DPI, 24-bit depth for color; 8-bith depth for black-and-white) to scan a book into your computer, one page at a time. Kindle Convert will then assemble all the image files into a single text document and sync it with your Amazon Cloud Drive for easy access.
One of the advantages of using Kindle Convert is that you can preserve all of your marginalia, autographs or any other handwritten material that's made its way into your personal collection. You can also scan books that are not available for purchase as Kindle books, such as out-of-print or self-published titles, not to mention picture books.
However, Kindle Convert does have two significant drawbacks: Scanning books is an enormous pain in the posterior, and you can do roughly the same thing for free.
To scan a hardcover book involves breaking the book's spine and scanning two pages at a time on a flatbed scanner. With paperback books, you're better off removing the binding entirely and just running the pages through a high-speed scanner, a handful at a time.
From there, you can use a service like Online OCR to convert your image files into text, and a free program like Calibre to convert a text file into a Kindle-compatible eBook. Kindle Convert offers simplicity, true, but it's nothing that savvy bibliophiles couldn't have done before.
Still, now that book-scanning software has arguably hit the mainstream, maybe someone will come up with a simpler way to scan hard copies. Alternatively, you could simply drop $10 on a digital copy of a book you already own and save yourself a significant headache.
Marshall Honorof is a Staff Writer for Tom's Guide. Contact him at mhonorof@tomsguide.com. Follow him @marshallhonorof. Follow us @tomsguide, on Facebook and on Google+.
Copyright 2015 Toms Guides , a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
