Transcription
If you do any type of research, then you know digital books are absolutely fantastic for taking notes, consolidating those notes, and being able to find different sections or subjects very quickly through the search features. And in this video, we're going to look at how we can do the same thing with physical books by converting these physical books into searchable PDFs.
It's a very handy feature because I really like physical books. Sometimes I just pick those up at stores when I'm traveling or if I'm hearing about town, and a lot of times there are certain materials that are only available in physical format, but I want to have that search ability. Now, I could go through this book and I could mark it up and I could put a bunch of flags on there, but it still makes it difficult to navigate or look for specific things.
Well, I've created videos on this channel before using my CZUR scanner, and I showed you how it could be a very useful tool. In this video, I'm going to specifically show you how we can create a searchable PDF using the CZUR scanner. So I'm going to turn the overhead light on the scanner, and I'm going to scan this book. I'm not going to scan the entire book right now, I'm just going to scan a little bit. So let's have a look at how I can do that.
First, I'm going to go into the scanner here. So let's grab the scanner in the software, and then I'm going to find the device. You'll notice that I have the book cover here, and you'll notice that I currently have it in the curved book format. I'm going to take a shot of the book itself. We'll just move the page elements to the side. So now I have the front cover. I have a foot pedal, so the clicking you might hear is me actually using my foot to take that picture. And then what I'll do is I'll take the dust jacket off because I may not want the dust jacket, and it's going to be a little easier to scan without it. So here, I'll take the book.
But now, what I'm going to do is put it into the curved book scanning mode, and now I'm going to use these two little paddles, I guess you would call them. I have a right and I have a left one, and that just allows me to hold the book flat, and you'll see that in a moment. So now that I have it as curved book, let's go ahead and scan in a number of the pages. And in this case here, I'll go ahead and use the endorsements here. I can do this quite quickly. So we'll just do maybe the first chapter here.
So as you can see, it's very quick to go in and scan the book. I'm just flipping the pages, touching the foot pedal, and you can see that it's quickly scanning each of the pages here. Now, as I go through and scan this book, you're going to notice that I don't really take a lot of time to look at a lot of the book. I'm just really trying to capture it, and the scanner does a very good job with these books. Sometimes with some oversized books, it's a little bit more involved to scan things. So if you're scanning things like artwork or large format books, you may have to scan just a section of the book. But you can see a typical hardcover or a paperback book, I'm able to go in very quickly, and I'm able to scan the pages very, very fast, very rapidly.
So I'm just going to go in and I'm just going to scan the first chapter here, so maybe a couple more into the second chapter. So now I've scanned some of the book. It wouldn't take me too long to scan the entire book, but I'm going to set that aside so that we can show you how to create the searchable PDF.
So here in the software, you can see that it's processing all of the pages that I scanned. If I scroll up, I can see how far I've made it. You can see all of these pages are coming in nice and clean, and those are going to be converted into that PDF format. You'll also notice if I click on one of the pages that's been processed, if I go here, you'll notice that the yellow paddles do not appear. You can actually see a little bit of an artifact of one of the paddles there because what it does is it removes those from the scan as best it can, and I'm not going to be too fussy about that. But I do need them to all process so that I can create that searchable PDF.
It took a few moments in order to process those pages, but that's okay because I have a cup of coffee, so I always have something to do while I'm waiting for something to process. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to create the searchable PDF. And as a quick note, just so that you're aware, here in Canada, I have something called a fair use policy, which means that from a copyright standpoint, I'm permitted to take a digital copy of a book that I'm using for research purposes that I own. So I have this book here, I purchased the book, I purchased the physical book, I can make that this digital copy of the entire book for purposes of research and for backup and archival. I would not be able to distribute this electronic copy, that that would then be in violation of copyright, but I can use it for research and such.
So let's go back to the software here. So within the software, what I'm going to do is now that I've scanned my book here, I'm going to go in. You'll see that all of the images are here, and I'm going to click the little button to select all of them. So you can see that they are all selected, and then I'm going to go to searchable PDF. Underneath searchable PDF, I'm going to choose English, that's my language of preference, and I'm going to make sure I have a high-quality PDF, it makes it just easier to read, and I've got the space on my system. So now I'm going to go in here. You can see that there are other languages you can convert to as well. So if you're doing any type of foreign research, I have some books, uh, some myth books about mythology in Germany, but anyways, we'll go here.
And now I'm going to give this a name. So for this particular book, it's called Powerful Teaching. So I'll just put on my desktop for the purposes of this demo. So I'll call this Powerful Teaching, and we'll call it the scan for that. So I have the Powerful Teaching scan, and it's going to start initializing the engine. And once again, it's 42 pages that I scanned. It goes fairly quickly through them, but it does give me time to have a sip of my coffee. So I sped that up for you a little bit. Had many sips of my coffee. It takes a little while if you have a longer book to get that scan because it goes through, looks at each of the pages, and then it does uh optical character recognition on there to make it a searchable document. So it'll combine everything together, and then we'll be able to search this document.
So now I have the document. I'm going to go into the document here, and I don't have Adobe Acrobat installed on this computer, so I could open it up in Adobe Acrobat, obviously, but I'm just going to open it up in the Edge browser, and that does give me this search option. So a very common thing that I might want to look at is retrieval practice. So maybe I want to look at this particular book, look at where they have retrieval practice, and I'll put in the entire term. And you can see here that the term retrieval practice, in the 44 odd pages or 42 pages I have here, appears 19 times.
So now I'm able to go through and I'm able to look through the document. I can see that it's in the table of contents. I can go through and scroll through each time that it appears, and this is a very quick way for me to go in and look for different subject areas based on retrieval practice and see what sort of information is in this book for doing different types of research on the concept. I find this to be exceptionally useful and a great way for me to be able to do my research without having to flip through a book a whole bunch of times in order to find a specific term. I'm able to create this searchable PDF from physical books.
If you enjoyed this video, if you want to learn more about the CZUR scanner, I do have another video here on the channel where I go through some of the other features of it. I'm always happy to make more. Comment down below if there's anything else you'd like to see around research methodologies, around the ways that I can convert physical to digital, in the ways that I have a research flow. Actually, those are a lot of different topics. Maybe I should make some videos on all of them. But anyways, I do have a lot of videos here on the channel. Subscribe, like, share with colleagues, and let me know what you think in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching.