Want to ditch the heavy backpack full of books and join the digital book revolution? Here's out guide to creating a digital copy of just about any book -- whether it's your own masterpiece or an old paper copy of Cervantes -- into a digital book.

This article is part of a wiki anyone can edit. If you have advice to add about rolling your own e-books, log in and contribute.

Format Overview

Before you get busy converting your library into e-books, just remember this: traditional books are anything but antiquated, as you are about to learn. Once you see just what you're in for on this shtick, you may well want to save those old, beautiful paper and board masterpieces. But, assuming you still want to go ahead on this folly, let's start with some formatting decisions. Unfortunately, due to the relatively new status of e-book readers, there is no one-size-fits-all format yet. The popular ePub format is probably the closest thing and works nearly everywhere, but sadly, not on Amazon's popular Kindle reader.

But once you've got your book in the ePub format, you're 90 percent there. All of the other major e-book readers, including Apple's iBooks on its iOS devices, the Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony's various readers can all handle the ePub format. That just leaves the Kindle. Luckily there is Calibre a free and cross-platform (though rather ugly and unwieldy) e-book manager that can convert your ePub document into something the Kindle can display.

Converting digital files

So you've penned your masterpiece and you want to give it to the world in digital form. But how do you do that?

If you're starting with a Microsoft Word document, the simplest way to convert that to an e-book format is start by exporting it as a PDF file. Once you have a PDF, just use one of the many free PDF to ePub converters (the previously mentioned Calibre can convert PDF to ePub).

Unfortunately, the PDF to ePub conversion process is not perfect. If you're just trying to get something on a reader that doesn't support PDF, then it works well enough. If you're trying to produce high quality content for sale, you're better off using a dedicated layout program to generate your ePub file.

While not cheap, software like Adobe's InDesign will create much higher quality books and give you more control over layout, design and style.

Converting dead trees

The above techniques and tools work well if your source is already in digital form, but what if you want to convert an existing paper book? Well, it can be done -- using free software, no less -- but it takes a bit of work.

Scanning

First off you're going to need to scan the book in question. While there are specialized V-shaped scanners that make book scanning much easer, most of us have flatbed scanners. The problem with flatbed scanners is that books aren't flat.

Unless you plan to debind the book, you're probably going to end up with some warped text and shadows on the edges of each page when you convert the images to an ePub document. For most books, you can get the text looking pretty good if you scan carefully.

But if you want a pure, digital copy with searchable text and all, there is a way to do it.

Using OCR

The ideal process works like this: scan the entire book into images, run the images through optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract the text. Once you have the text, just follow the steps above to get an ePub document.

We'd recommend FreeOCR, a non-commercial bit of software that's a free download.

The only catch -- aside from the time investment of scanning an entire book -- is the OCR software. While OCR tools like FreeOCR (which is what Google Books uses) are pretty good, a truly accurate OCR engine that can perfectly convert your text remains a pipe dream.

OCR software in its current state achieves an accuracy rate of above 95 percent. The quality of the output depends on the quality of the image you start with. So correcting an OCR'd document that started with a dirty scan job can be a tedious, time consuming process. Luckily, most antique books have rather large print, and translate well.

The reality is that you're going to have to go through afterwards and fix a few words and phrases yourself. But for books that hold personal memories and are long out-of-print -- maybe a cookbook that great-grandma Agnes wrote -- it can be worth it. You'll end up with a document that makes a wonderful gift you can share with your friends and family.

With a little patience and perseverance you can convert your own library and cram countless e-books into your backpack without the weight of the physical world on your shoulders.

Authors: How-To Wiki

to know more click here