Using a webcam to make an e-book?

[Newhotness]

hello, i recently bought a textbook at school second hand, only to find out the solutions manual was not included but normally comes with the text when bought new. A friend of mine said he knew someone once who used a webcam to create a computer version of his texts in e-book or pdf format. is this possible to do and if so, how is it done. thankx. I am running winXP and the camera is a logitech laptop camera.

[kobrakommander56]

make you do all sexy things on webcams boi!

[rridgely]

I dont know of an easy way to do this... I guess you could take a pic of each page seperately and then paste them into openoffice and save it as a pdf...

It would probably be better to use a scanner though.

[kobrakommander56]

at least i thoght it wass funny

[Eldmannen]

Maybe easier with a scanner since they have higher resolution and are made for scanning unlike webcams which are made for video converation.

Maybe you can get your hands on some OCR (Optical character recognition) software that can read the letters on the picture and output it as text.

 

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

 

I dont know of any such software though, but I do know that it does exist.

[hazelnut]

Eldmannen,

 

Here's an open source one for you!!

 

http://jocr.sourceforge.net/index.html

 

Newhotness,

 

This one may be worth alook for you although I have not used it myself.

 

http://www.simpleocr.com/

[lokoike]

Newhotness,

 

This one may be worth alook for you although I have not used it myself.

 

http://www.simpleocr.com/

Thanks for that link, hazelnut! I'll have to check that out.

 

@ Newhotness: I'm not sure if you use OpenOffice or MS Office, but if you use MS Office, its one redeeming quality is built-in scanning and OCR tools. Also, Adobe makes products that have OCR capabilities, but needless to say, they are very expensive, bloated, and slow.

 

 

@ kk56: Very, very disturbing... bad dreams...

[zaphirer]

I use eReader and MakeBook for my palm pilot, it takes *.txt files and converts them to a Palm-readable format. If you're looking for something to read on the computer, then scanning and then making it a PDF is probably the best way to go.

[Glenn]

In our office, we're testing OCR scanning documents into PDF. Not only is the text searchable and selectable (great when you're doing research), the file sizes are about 10% of an image file.

[TheFiresInTheSky]

if you search online, you can find most of the books out there. i found 5 out of 7 of my school books but i didnt find any answer keys. sorry...