The following is a Plus Edition article, written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
A newsletter reader wrote and asked, "How can I download books from Google Books and convert them to text that I can search or save on my hard drive?"
The quick answer is, "You cannot do that easily." However, the longer answer is, "It is possible to do that if you have time, money, and computing power." Today I thought I'd describe the steps required.
The problem is that you can easily download and save Google books as PDF files, but the pages are typically stored as images within the PDFs. When you are looking at the pages on your screen, you are looking at IMAGES of the original books, not text. It looks like text to the human eye, but your computer knows that it is displaying a picture of the page. In fact, it is possible to search or convert text information within a PDF text, but it is not so easy to search within an image.
The problem with displaying PDF files on a smaller screen is that the text does not automatically wordwrap to fit the smaller window. You may have to manually scroll from, left to right in order to read each line of text, a tedious process.
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