Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

General discussion about software packages and releases, new software you've found, and threads by programmers and script writers.

Moderator: peterZ

GemmaGem
Posts: 9
Joined: 04 Jan 2022, 21:25
Number of books owned: 300
Country: United States

Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by GemmaGem »

Hello All. I recently decided to convert my physical library into an ebook library. Like most things I jumped in head first and am floundering. I purchased an iOCHOW hi def scanner. It was supposed to have finger hiding technology- it does not. I figured I could get software for this to crop out my fingers. I tried using the epub conversion it comes with and it's terrible. It jumbled all the pages together and added random letters into it.
I'm wondering if I was supposed to make it a pdf first and then make it into an epub? Or if the software just isn't that good. Lots of people have been talking about ABBYY and I'm wondering if I should purchase that to take care of most of my problems.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
cday
Posts: 451
Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 14:55
Number of books owned: 0
Country: UK

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by cday »

Could you give the full designation of the scanner you purchased?

I don't have any experience with camera scanners myself, but some forum members do including at least the Czur models.
GemmaGem
Posts: 9
Joined: 04 Jan 2022, 21:25
Number of books owned: 300
Country: United States

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by GemmaGem »

The scanner is an iOCHOW portable high definition book document scanner. I got it mainly cause it had curve flattening technology- which works well and finger hiding technology- which does not work well. I was unaware of the Epub software but I got it for the PDF conversion originally. Which was good cause the Epub software isn't working that well at the moment.
cday
Posts: 451
Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 14:55
Number of books owned: 0
Country: UK

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by cday »

GemmaGem wrote: 05 Jan 2022, 18:27 The scanner is an iOCHOW portable high definition book document scanner.
That model would seem to be discontinued, and probably replaced by the S3 model. I am attaching a saved web page from one retailer, and also a saved web page from the iOCHOW website showing the currently available models, as the existing links can't be expected to be available for long.

There seem to be a lot of generally similar scanners of this type being marketed, but there don't seem to be many independent reviews, which would provide a useful basis for assessing a particular model, only purchaser's feedback which could also of course be useful, if possibly harder to evaluate and sometimes relating to a different model. Most results from an online search are little more than links to Amazon, which no doubt reward the 'reviewer'.

I got it mainly cause it had curve flattening technology- which works well and finger hiding technology- which does not work well. I was unaware of the Epub software but I got it for the PDF conversion originally. Which was good cause the Epub software isn't working that well at the moment.
Regarding the finger hiding results, could you post a typical scanned page or two? Assuming that the present results can't be improved using settings available in the interface software, I am thinking that it might be possible to batch process the images for a particular book to remove them, although that wouldn't be ideal with the settings probably needing to be varied for each book.

Regarding the EPUB results, if the results can't be improved using the settings available in the interface software, and the PDF output is satisfactory, if you would prefer to use EPUBs I would think that they could probably be easily produced from the satisfactory PDF files.

I have no personal experience of EPUB but others who have posted when the forum was more active certainly have, and should be able to provide some advice. Abbyy Finereader might well be an option, but there might also be open source software that would meet your needs. If you wish to consider that option, I would suggest starting a new thread for that topic might be more productive, something like 'Convert PDF output to EPUB'. You might also, of course, search the forum for existing posts relating to EPUB. Alternatively, if the page images can be output, it should be possible to create EPUBs directly from those, with options to enhance the images if desired.


Saved product webpages.zip
(896.87 KiB) Downloaded 144 times
BruceG
Posts: 99
Joined: 14 May 2014, 23:17
Number of books owned: 500
Country: Australia

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by BruceG »

I have a Czur E16 scanner. For finger removal special finger grips were provided that the software recognizes them. If you want to go to text or epub this does not matter if you use something like Abbyy Finereader, as pictures can be removed and only work on the text.
No matter what software you use editing is required. Editing does does not have to be done in pdf, it can be done in Word or a text editor. There are epub editors. How much editing required depends on the original material, scanning settings and what you are prepared to put up with. If this is for personal use or for others you may give a different answer. How much time you want to devote to editing varies from one person to another. Would you spend a day to edit a 400 page book? I would but I would not spent a week to edit a thousand page newspaper.
If you upload a few pages as a straight scan as a pdf, ocr pdf and epub, people can have a look and talk about the same thing.
BillGill
Posts: 139
Joined: 18 Dec 2016, 17:13
E-book readers owned: Calibre, FBReader
Number of books owned: 7000
Country: USA

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by BillGill »

I have been digitizing books for several years now. If you have a PDF that is satisfactory you can pretty easily convert it to an EPUB using Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/). Calibre is a free program that can convert text between quite a number of different formats, including PDF. It also comes with an EPUB editor. However, I prefer to do my editing in a text editor. I use Word, but LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free programs that do almost as well as Microsoft Office. EPUB is based on HTML and Calibre's editor is not a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, so editing a book using the Calibre editor can be tricky.

I start by scanning the book with my home made scanner so that I have images of all the pages to start from. Then I OCR them using ABBY FineReader. The output of that goes into Word. My editing time depends on the quality of the scans. I just finished a 200 page book and spent just over 7 hours editing it. On that one I got a pretty good scan. Some are not that good, and if I get a 400 page book the time of course increases a lot.

ABBY FineReader is of course a commercial program, so it will cost extra.

I prefer EPUB because it can be read on almost any device, including your phone. It is in fact the basis for most digital book formats, such as Kindle and NOOK. There are free eBook apps for most devices.

Bill
GemmaGem
Posts: 9
Joined: 04 Jan 2022, 21:25
Number of books owned: 300
Country: United States

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by GemmaGem »

I tried three different things tonight.
-Last night I was able to talk to someone who makes Book Scanning tutorials. I was only allowed to ask him a few questions otherwise he would have needed to charge me. He mentioned Scan Tailor which is the third time I heard this name. I downloaded it since it was free and tried it out with a few book pages. It took care of the issue with the finger hiding. The bad news is now I need a program to turn JPG into PDF. I still dont know how to turn a PDF into an ebook and link it to my Kindle.
-I was able to turn the scanned pages into a PDF but I couldn't edit out my fingers.
-I tried to open it in OpenOffice and it was all sorts of messed up. I normally only use OpenOffice for book writing and I feel its not really reliable for anything else but that is my opinion.

I took care of one problem and made more problems :lol:
BruceG
Posts: 99
Joined: 14 May 2014, 23:17
Number of books owned: 500
Country: Australia

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by BruceG »

There are a number of free online services that produce the text you need. You upload the pdfs they convert and you get the text file. Or you could down load a trial version of Abbyy Finereader and do the same. And follow Bill's advise.
If you uploaded some pages we could tell you if 'all messed up' was the best you can get and you will need to do lots of editing. Normally errors are less than 1% for a printed book.
cday
Posts: 451
Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 14:55
Number of books owned: 0
Country: UK

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by cday »

If you need clean page images and ScanTailor produces good results from your images, then that would seem to be the way to go. Note, however, that there are now at least three versions available, so it might be worth looking further at those.

But if you decide you only need EPUBs, and the scanner software produces PDFs with reasonable recognition accuracy, it should be possible to select the text in the PDFs and then copy it directly into a word processor, or for that matter even a text editor, so that any required corrections can be made. The popular LibreOffice Writer software which was forked from OpenOffice quite a while back supports export to EPUB format, I don't know if OpenOffice does if you wish to continue using that.

If you need better recognition accuracy to reduce the time needed for proofreading, then Abbyy FineReader provides excellent accuracy, and would provide several alternative ways of proceeding from the alternative forms of output from your scanner, and also support output to EPUB format, if you can justify the time required to learn how to use it effectively and the increasing expense.
GemmaGem
Posts: 9
Joined: 04 Jan 2022, 21:25
Number of books owned: 300
Country: United States

Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by GemmaGem »

So I was trying to takes some scans to show. The program kept shutting down on me which was frustrating cause I had to start all over again. This happened to me three times not sure what caused it. I had to keep picking the book up to maneuver it otherwise it would only scan half a page. The line to split the pages was never were the scan showed so I had to keep moving the book back and forth until I had a decent page scanned. It took me a lot longer than 5 seconds to take a scan like the manual said. More like 2 minutes and at this point I'm so frustrated with this scanner I'm thinking of sending it back.
Attachments
The lower right side letters elongate randomly every few pages
The lower right side letters elongate randomly every few pages
TGRR4.png (224.2 KiB) Viewed 4464 times
The left side of the page gets weirdly shifty
The left side of the page gets weirdly shifty
TGRR3.png (210.38 KiB) Viewed 4464 times
finger hiding doesn't always work
finger hiding doesn't always work
TGRR2.png (217.54 KiB) Viewed 4464 times
Finger hiding blur finally started to work
Finger hiding blur finally started to work
TGRR1.png (226.34 KiB) Viewed 4464 times
Post Reply