Digitizing a old book

[omega50]

Wondering if anyone has real world experience in bringing an old book to a digital state.
Costs? Pitfalls? Other concerns? Easiest way to achieve this?
Trying to hunt down a copy of an book written in the 1970's in Edenwold Saskatchewan that essentially is our family history. I believe it is about 500 pages. Would like to update with new family connections that have occurred since the 70's.

Would like to then share it with our extended family

[CMichaud]

What is the name of the book?

Try a search on archive(dot)org

[Lornce]

Digitizing a book requires a scanner and and some time and software. If you want the text to be "live" and editable as opposed to a picture, you will also need OCR Software, that will turn the text from a picture to live text that you can edit. The best way (speaking from experience) is to remove all the book pages (unbinding). This so you can lay them flat for perfect scanning. Then rebind the book for preservation.

You them separately scan photos and retouch. Then address the raw text that has been separated by the OCR software and proof for spelling errors (software isn't perfect). Then finally use a graphic art program to reassemble the book and print it out. But a heads up here. Most printed and online material is copy write to the author or creator. Any use of the material that is not owned my you and land you into legal problems.

[Au revoir, Gopher]

If you want to put the info into a genealogy program so you have a family tree, Brother's Keeper works well.

As for digitizing a book, Lornce has covered the basics. If you are going to do this yourself, I would recommend a good quality scanner capable of duplex sheet feeding. Single page scanning (open scanner, put down page, close scanner, scan page, open scanner, turn page over, close scanner, scan page, open scanner, remove page, put down new page...) gets old quickly... you might run out of black currant port before you're done 500 pages

ARG

[ctd]

Look up the app cam scanner for your phone.
Try it out and see if it might work for you.

[pannas]

What about a handheld scanner that you can run down each page? You won't have to unbind the book and I believe some let you save it as a word doc for easier editing

[RandyBoBandy]

I could check with one of my daughter's for pricing. She got all her text books from the UofA Food Science programs put onto an external hard drive so she could take all the info to the UK, for work

[MrDave]

Check the LDS Familysearch site. They have many family historiy books already done. Found some of my family that way.