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I'm working on a project at the public library and the most indispensable book on the subject they have is in poor condition and can't leave the library.
For as many times as I'll need to use this book, I really don't want to wear their copy out and I'm better off having my own.
I have not been able to find it digitized online in any form and there are currently no copies for sale. Does anyone have any experience with book scanning
tech, particularly cell phone apps? Thanks! 

Do you need the OCR so you can search and copy text?  Or are you just trying to preserve some digital copy?  I've scanned docs on my Android phone using the Google Drive scan capability.  It's easy to do multiple pages and it saves the doc as a PDF.  What I've found is that opening the PDF in Drive doesn't recognize the text.  If I open the PDF in the Apple Preview app on my Mac, it does recognize the text and lets me search and copy.  The free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn't recognize the text, but I think the paid version would let me do that.  So, scanning through Google Drive may work for you as long as you have the patience to scan each page.

I suspect the library has access to scanners and OCR software for archival purposes and that this tome is in need of archiving.

Your getting your own copy might be an issue though.

  • Author
On 9/26/2025 at 9:59 AM, fuggled said:

Do you need the OCR so you can search and copy text?  

I do. 

I appreciate the responses. After more research I went with an iPhone app that has been around a long time and is well updated.
For sure it works, but there's definitely a learning curve here and the software seems to have a mind of its own. One page comes out
great and the next is all garbled despite doing everything exactly the same. At this point I blame operator error. Still, you do end up with
editable searchable text and that's what I was after 🤘

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