Need a chapter for a class, your handwritten notes as a PDF, or a recipe book page to keep? You don't need a flatbed scanner. With your phone and Camera Scanner you photograph two pages at a time and get a clean, one-page-per-page PDF.
Scan a book in 5 steps
- Open Camera Scanner and tick Book: two pages in each photo.
- Open the book flat on a table in good light. Pressing the pages down with your fingers at the edges helps.
- Tap Open camera, frame both pages, and take the photo. Turn on Auto capture and it shoots by itself when you hold still, and waits for you to turn the page.
- Repeat for each spread.
- Tap Make PDF. Every photo becomes two pages, cut at the fold, in reading order.
What happens to each photo
- The pages are found and straightened, so a photo taken at an angle comes out flat.
- The fold is found from its shadow, and the book is cut there; the shadow itself is trimmed off both pages.
- Each page is cleaned up: black and white for text, grey for pencil and drawings, Magic colour for coloured pages.
- Blank pages, such as the back of a cover, can be left out with Leave out blank pages.
Make it searchable and small
- Tick Make the text searchable (OCR) to search and copy the text later.
- Choose Smaller file under File size for a long book, or run the finished PDF through Compress PDF.
- Already have a scanned book as a PDF without text? Use OCR PDF.
A word on copyright
Scanning a book you own for your own study is usually fine, but sharing whole copyrighted books is not. Check the rules where you live, and your school's or library's policy, before sharing scans.