Kindle Convert Turns Your Scans Into Proper Ebooks

During that magical transition period from physical music discs to digital files, you likely bought your first MP3 player and then stared down the massive pile of CDs filling your bookcase. Thus came the long process of ripping your physical media so that you could use it on the newest piece of technological marvel, and all was well in your world. We're seeing that same kind of transitioning happening with books, with many beholding their slim Kindle and likewise eyeballing all those heavy books lying around, but merging the two together isn't quite as simple.

The biggest difference between ripping a CD and ripping a book is that the latter is (usually) composed of hundreds of page, and there's no easy way to automate the scanning processing. Unless you fancy cutting the binding off and then putting all the pages into an auto-feeding scanner, you'll be flipping and manually scanning pages until you're ready to give up reading forever.

Still, there are some things you simply want on your Kindle for reasons both myriad and unimportant. Maybe they're scans of a story your kid wrote, documents that prove some unmentionable conspiracy to be true. Whatever the reason you feel like scanning something physical to your Kindle, Amazon has decided to make it easy by creating the software necessary itself and providing that software to anyone with $49 USD to spare.

It's called Kindle Convert, and it'll trump your ordinary scans by turning the resulting digital images into books that function the way Kindle books should — with adjustable font sizes, highlighting support, dictionary definitions, notes, and all that good stuff. If you've an irreplaceable journal you want on your Kindle and regular scans won't work, Kindle Convert might be worth the price tag. For everything else, though, you'd probably be better off shelling out for an existing digital edition.

VIA: The Ebook Reader