A latest Amazon feature could offer a new lease of life to your varied reading habits. E-commerce giant Amazon has introduced its Amazon Convert service that will allow users to convert the hard copy of their books to e-books.
Amazon's digital reading market isn't quite as booming as its US counterpart. And the new feature is to lure in more and more readers outside the States to Amazon's Kindle range of e-book readers, which will also bode well for the company's overall numbers in terms of sales and popularity.
That said, the transformation process isn't as easy as some may think. If you are indeed interested in converting your hard covers into e-books, almost patiently and meticulously, you will have to scan the book one or two pages at a time using the computer's scanner.
When the reader scans the title page, Kindle Convert will check if the same book is already available in the e-book form in Amazon's e-book market. If it does, it will ask the reader to buy the formatted version of the concerned book rather than scan it all over again.
Once you've paid and installed the software, the company will ask you to begin scanning the book you want to preserve.
According to the company, Kindle Convert is meant to save handwritten amendments, autographs and images; although it needs to be mentioned that the system works best with books that consist mostly of texts with no images or other such fancy layouts.
The new system will preserve handwritten amendments by marking those sections as an image file. Everything else, however, according to an Engadget report, will be optically character recognized into a format that works with Kindle. But all that comes at an expense of you sweating it out for a successful conversion.
"For instance, after scanning, you'll have to highlight the text portions on every page, mark chapter headings, subheadings and then edit the text to amend issues," the report states. And once the process is complete, Amazon will push the book to the user's cloud drive for you to download to any Kindle or Kindle App.
Also, all the converted e-books will have all the features that Kindle offers like Whispersync, dictionary look-up and ability to make notes. But as it seems, the new conversion feature is mostly meant for die-hard preservationists. The company is selling the software for $49 (Currently discounted to $19).
