Data is not information.  Information is not knowledge.  Knowledge is not wisdom.  Wisdom is not truth.  Truth is not life. 

Sunday, January 20, 2013

I (e)published a book! 

The book that I scanned last year (Short Papers on Church History, Vol.  1 by Andrew Miller) is in the process of being made available through the Kindle Direct Publishing program.  It should take a day or two to make its way across the various Amazon servers, I understand, but should then be available worldwide. 

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.