Create ebooks from books

Question

I have seen that there are many ebooks available on web. How are they created from a book or do you actually write one by hand? If they capture an image from a book, how are the fonts made copyable?

Answer 1

for most part, the masters are digital, and its a simple matter of saving it as a pdf (in fact some publishers even release the books as e-books before the physical copy is released)

Otherwise its a matter of scanning the books, using OCR to convert the bulk of it to text, re-proof reading it, and adding any images back. Fonts are fairly standard, or a close enough font is used.

Answer 2

In the past eBooks were mostly in PDF format but the ebooks that are read on the Kindle are in .mobi format and the books that are read on any other reader are in ePub format. Both formats are based on HTML, the type of markup that is used for webpages. PDFs come in two forms - if you scan anything then the scans can be turned into a PDF, but that is just a picture of the document. What's important is the OCR process that turns the text in the document into machine-readable text - the type of text that you and I are using right here. OCR isn't perfect but there are some methods that are better than others. Once the text is in machine-readable form it can be marked up in HTML and put in .mobi or ePub format.