They’re just getting digitized, like everything else. While there’s a real charm to owning a stack of bound paper that you can fold the corners of, underline, and read without staring at a screen, eBooks are far more convenient. Your backpack can hold maybe four or five books, but one e-reader or tablet can hold thousands of titles. Plus, e-readers allow you to search text, share the saucy bits, and read at night without a light.

eBook Conversion Swift ProSys

You can publish your own eBook relatively easily. Any text you find on the web that you’d rather read on your Kindle? Port it over. And, if you’ve got the time, you can turn your favorite antiquated paper book into an eBook too. It’s just going to take a lot of page turning—and scanning.

So whether you’re ready to share the manuscript that’s been sitting in a folder on your desktop for years, or you’d like digitize an old paper copy of Cervantes, here’s our process to creating a digital copy of just about any book.

Scan the book into a PDF file
Convert the PDF using OCR into a document file
Gross restoration: remove headers, footers, page numbers, and bugshit produced when conversion “reads” speckles, debris, foxing, watermarks or penciled notations as characters; restore paragraphs; restore special formatting such as italics or bolded text; remove all formatting artifacts embedded by the PDF and the word processor.
Fine tune and proofread.
Format the fully restored text for either digital or print-on-demand.
Proofread the eBook and/or print-on-demand.