Kindle Convert: ‘Rip’ Books to Your Kindle

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We’re all familiar with the practice of ‘ripping’ CDs. You stick a disk into your computer and copy the songs onto your hard drive. From there, you have the option of putting them on your phone, tablet, MP3 player, etc. But what about eBooks? Since it seems that books are going through the same transition that music went through 10-15 years ago, can’t we take all of our physical copies and read them digitally?

Well yes, we’ve always been able to do this – with a scanner. You take each page of a book and scan it to your computer. From there, you can take the book and put it on pretty much any device that can read PDFs. You could even use OCR software to turn it into an eBook-friendly ePub file. However, if you have a book that consists of hundreds of pages (like most books), this is going to be quite a laborious process.

So, Amazon has arrived to save the day and to make things much easier. Or has it? In fact, if you look at their new ‘Amazon Convert’ service, you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that they’ve made things a whole lot more difficult.

The whole scanning business is still there, but then they make you pay $49 for a piece of software, and then make you highlight each section of text, headings and subheadings. Plus, they’ll even ask you to edit the text to fix any issues.

A laborious process already, made even more laborious.

Source: Engadget