eReader: Book Binding with J.D.

@ jdmontague.com
As a follow-up to my "book destruction" post earlier in the year, I'd like to point out that my friend J.D. has posted some lovely techniques for home book binding.

I'm not certain if these techniques could be used to rebind a book that was unbound for electronic scanning, but it's theoretically possible. If anyone has any luck with this, report back here -- preferably with pictures! :)

3 comments:

J.D. Montague said...

Oh Ana, you are too sweet. :) Now I actually have to finish that tutorial I was planning to write...or maybe just put up the journal cover template.

And I have *no* idea how I missed your book deconstruction post. Can you saw awesome slathered with awesomesauce? If only I didn't have this weird aversion to damaging books...even bad ones. But staring at that large evil bookshelf of overflowing books makes me thing I need to get over that aversion. BTW, it might be an ideal time for me to test out Nuance OmniPage (which basically reads scanned text and turns it into something editable).

Ana Mardoll said...

J.D., you are so welcome. I'm really in awe of your pictures -- so cute! If you DO deconstruct/reconstruct a book, I demand pictures. :)

Inquisitive Raven said...

I've used Omnipage. It works pretty well for simple black on white text if you get a clean scan. In fact, I'd say getting a good high contrast scan is critical to getting good results. It doesn't work so well if the text is on a colored background, and it really doesn't like colored text on a colored background. Getting good results on a cookbook that uses medium blue text on a light blue background took a lot of manual correction, and frankly I converted the text to black on white.  Also, if there's images or tables on the page, the software can be, well, idiosyncratic about how it draws conversion zones. It can create zones for images (not converted, but placed in document), text (converted), and tables (converted, sometimes you need to fine tune the table layout by hand). Anything not in one of these zones won't make it to the final document. I've been know to dump page borders that I thought extraneous this way. All of this applies to version 11. If you've got something more recent, it may be better about zone drawing, but I suspect there's only so much it can do about low contrast text.

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