As a fan of text to speech I’ve been scanning books for a number of years (maybe more than 20) and didn’t really find a good solution until recently that I was comfortable recommending to someone less obsessed than me. This app vFlat for iOS is just amazing. It says it utilizes AI to improve the quality of the scans. You can really scan a book to PDF or TXT in a reasonable amount of time and the quality is about as good as a flatbed scanner but you don’t need to cut the book up or anything. I just scanned a book a had bought used in Seoul while I was in Korea last Fall and it didn’t take too long and the OCR function worked well too. Now I’m reading the book in LIngQ.
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Thanks! I had been using FineReader for those type of scans, but vFlat is much, MUCH better!
downloaded. Thanks. 
Looks like there is an android version. Will check it out.
wow this is amazing. I can’t believe it has Persian.
I’ve never tried scanning a book with my phone. Do you have any tips? It’s a bit cumbersome.
I did a quick test and it seems to work really well. It eliminates the dashes for words that are split over two lines. Handles columns. Cropping is nice too and the OCR seems better than similar apps I’ve used. One thing I didn’t quite figure out was adding multiple pages but I assume this is possible and I just need to spend a little more time with it.
It will depend on your phone and whatever accessories you have. I was skeptical but the two page at a time option worked great on my iPhone 14. I didn’t try the automatic scanning but it might be worth trying. My phone has a thumb ring on the back so it’s easy to hold with one hand over the book and snap a picture while holding the book open with my other hand. I can imagine if you have a phone stand it could be even easier.
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Thanks for recommending this! It’s a game changer for me. It’s so accurate!!! I put the Kindle text on the smallest font-size and it captured the whole first chapter of Harry Potter (Chinese version) in 11 quick scans.
Vflat seems to work great, how do you go about getting the pdf into lingq from phone? I don’t seem to have an import option from that app into Lingq
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At the very least you could email to yourself. download to pc and then use browser import to import the pdf. I’m hoping there’s an easier way from the phone itself (I too, couldn’t find an option to share with Lingq directly).
If you share folder there should be an option to share text. That’s what I used. I think you can directly share with LingQ from there but that didn’t work the first try for me so instead of trying again I just selected “copy”, then opened linq, started an import, and pasted the text into the box. This worked fine for an entire book.
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Thanks for recommending this app. It’s so much better than what I was using before. I love it. To answer other people about transferring texts - I pressed ‘share’ on my iPad (which I was using to scan) and that brought up an option to save in a folder. I chose a file that is saved ‘in the cloud’ and which I can access on my laptop. From there it was straightforward.
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