PDF Conversion

October 2, 2011 1:58 PM

I have been trying to convert PDFs downloaded from Google Books with GooReader3 to DOC files. The conversion programs tried gave files that are readable, but not editable, in Word. I can grab the text and move it around the page as a block. The PDFs seem to have been converted into some Word readable graphic. I have other PDF files that I use as controls. These control files can be edited in Word after conversion. I am trying to convert PDF files of public domain books from Google Books downloaded with GooReader3. I need to change the font size so they are readable on my Kindle. GooReader downloads are to only PDF files that behave as a Word readable graphic after conversion. What am I looking at here?
posted by Raybun to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Google Books scans pages to images, and although they run an OCR against it to let you search the text, the core form still consists of a picture of a page.

For very clear text, you could run your own OCR against it (and you'll quickly learn why people don't do that and call it good, in practice).

Realistically, if you need a few pages actually in a text format, you get to type them in manually.
posted by pla at 2:03 PM on October 2, 2011

Try to find the books on Project Gutenberg. All of their books have been OCRed and proofread. Archive.org also has OCRed books, but I'm pretty sure they're not proofread.
posted by zsazsa at 3:01 PM on October 2, 2011

Oh, it looks like RetroRead converts free books on Google Books to EPUB, which is suitable for Kindle.
posted by zsazsa at 3:08 PM on October 2, 2011

Kindles will only read Mobipocket files, not ePubs zsazsa. It suits Amazon to have the Kindle be outside the e-book ecosystem that the rest of the publishing world is building.

Calibre will do it's best to convert an ePub to a Mobipocket file, but it's a lossy conversion as ePub is the richer format.
posted by pharm at 1:50 AM on October 3, 2011

(RetroRead is converting the ePubs available from Google books to a Kindle compatible format.)
posted by pharm at 1:51 AM on October 3, 2011