DIY Ebooks

As a voracious ebook reader, I have one big frustration: Although the availability of titles available through my favorite book stores, eReader and Mobipocket, is impressive -- and growing -- the stores still lack most out-of-print and "less popular" titles.

The other day, though, I found a great -- and free -- source for new ebooks: The public library. While my local does not have an ebook "lending" program as some systems do, they have shelves of what the do-it-yourself ebookmaker wants: Thousands of old books whose bindings are already broken, flexible, and easy to flatten for scanning. And, it's all free.

So, I've been taking matters into my own hands lately, by scanning some of the traditional books I've bought and never gotten around to reading -- and library books. Although it's a fairly time-consuming process -- an hour or two to scan and another hour to clean up the text and convert it to a .pdb file -- like many scanning tasks, it's easy to fit in for a few minutes here and there during the day or as I'm watching TV.

The process isn't perfect. Getting a book flat enough to get a decent scan is tough on the binding, and books with a lot of footnotes and references -- like many of the biographies I enjoy -- require a lot of clean up to create a good text.

Still, it gets the job done.

EDITED: To correct text pasted out of order