The scanning of the book itself, thanks to the new scanner (an Epson Perfection V500) was actually pretty quick - and ABBYY FineReader software converted it into a single file with few glitches. What took the time was the process of effectively proof-reading the whole book. What had to be done?
- I had to try and pick up what are known as "scannoes" - the OCR equivalent of typos;
- I wanted to impose a consistent style across the whole book that would work with things like the generation of a table of contents, and how it would be presented on a Kindle;
- I wanted to make sure that all italicised text was converted properly;
- I wanted to consistently replace (for example) ' with ‘ or ’ as appropriate, and where necessary ae with æ;
- There were the odd bursts of Greek characters!
So it turned into a time-consuming process - and as I say in the foreword, I'm pretty sure that I've not done it perfectly, so I may need to re-upload at some stage.
Anyway, if you're interested, the first place that you can find a link to the book is here. I'll add the UK address once it becomes available. I am intending to charge for the book, by the way - but only about £1.
