For those of you who have a large, well-maintained library of vintage novels, the prospect of being able to convert said novels into a digital medium should be a happy one. Unique and vintage copies of books can be backed up for posterity, and additionally being able to read through easily damaged or fragile old books could be a big bonus for archivists and serious librarians.
Amazon’s new Kindle feature makes this possible, if you can handle the prospect of scanning every single page of your favorite books. The paid feature, known as Kindle Convert, is now available from the Kindle App store. The program is quite advance, not only letting you copy books but also allowing you to change the fonts of said books.
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It’s also pretty cool. As well as being able to save the pages of well loved tomes, the program detects the text on the page and converts it into a standard Kindle page, including all the font options and size adjustments you’re already used to. Unique documents and other personal stuff is very easy to convert using the software.
The process of getting said books and documents on to your Kindle, is, however, quite a long and drawn out one. You’ll need a scanner which can create .jpeg, .tiff or .pdf images with 300-600 DPI, and and additionally you’ll need 24-bit depth for color or 8-bit black and white. This isn’t the hardest part, as most scanners should be able to manage this. What you’ll really struggle with is scanning, cropping and converting every single page.
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In other words, the time it’ll take to produce your very own digital version of an outdated or special book will no doubt be long, but once it’s complete your digital backup will be preserved for as long as there are places you can store it. Like we’ve said, it’s great for amateur archivists or librarians, but not great for these of you with busy work to be doing.
The new Amazon Kindle Convert program is available now from Amazon as a download for Windows PCs for $19.99, and apparently this is a reduced price from around $50. Whether this is a limited time thing where the program is reduced for a while or whether it’s just a clever way to make the program seem more valuable isn’t known, but if you want it you can get it at the link below.
Source: Kindle Convert @ Amazon.com
Via: Techcrunch