If you have a novel or non-fiction a course in miracles author in a hard copy format, the fact is that as of right now you might be missing out. Thanks to the likes of Amazon and Kobo, reading has found a whole new life thanks to their intelligent, yet easy to use and simplistic e-readers. The Amazon Kindle is, of course, the best selling e-reader in the world right now and Amazon now report that they are officially selling more digital books than they are physical ones for the first time in the company’s history.
This is mainly because of the sheer convenience that comes with a digital ebook. It really is as simple as finding the book, either through searching for the title or author or through looking in categories, buying it and it’s immediately on your device. No waiting and no delays in getting into the book.
So, as an author, how can you take advantage of this service? Well thousands already are. If you already have your book in a digital format such as a Microsoft Word file or otherwise, there are a number of pieces of software you can buy to make the book into an Amazon acceptable format, or an epub, which works on the majority of other devices available.
However for those of you that have a physical book but no digital version, the only other way is through a book scanning service. There are a number of providers of book scanning throughout the UK and many more across the world but few offer a number of different ways it can be done. Some companies have specialist book scanning equipment which makes sure that your book stays in great condition through the scanning process. These scanners are very expensive so there aren’t many around, however those that do have them provide an excellent service which keeps the book in excellent condition, exposes the pages to much less light than on regular scanners and produces excellent results. This is useful if you only have one or two copies of your book remaining, however if you can spare one, most companies will also offer a service which would involve the book being unbound and the pages being ran through an automatic feed scanner. This service is much quicker and also costs less, but at the expense of the book which will be dismantled. However if you can spare the book, it’s highly recommended.
Once the book scanning has taken place, it will then be sent through the process of OCR. OCR is the process of taking those images produced from the scan and converting them to a document which is readable and editable on a computer and in the case of ebooks will normally be converted into a Microsoft Word format.
