Scanned books for researchers and students
Interlibrary-loan scans, course readers and out-of-print monographs come back as clean, searchable PDFs with the original pagination, ready for Zotero, your notes and your e-reader.
Key takeaways
- Your page references stay right: every page keeps its place, so page 214 in the PDF is page 214 in print.
- A text layer lets you search, highlight and copy quotations, and lets Zotero index the full text.
- Cropping the margins and whitening the paper makes a monograph readable on a 7 to 10 inch e-reader at normal size.
- It reads 19 languages, including English, German, French, Latin, Italian and Spanish, plus Fraktur and Ancient Greek mixed with Latin.
- FixMyScan keeps the page as an image. It does not reflow, translate or export plain text.
The scans research leaves you with
Interlibrary loan sends a chapter as a grey PDF. A department copier produces a course reader with a dark band down every spine. An out-of-print monograph exists only as an archive download with 1920s type on yellowed paper. Each of these is a picture of pages, often with no text behind it.
That costs time in three ways. You cannot search it for the term you need. You cannot copy a quotation, so you retype it and risk an error. And on an e-reader the text is too small to read for long, because the page shrinks to fit the screen, margins and all.
Citation-safe by design
Many tools that “convert” a scan for e-readers rebuild the text as a reflowing EPUB. That loses the thing a researcher needs most: where a sentence sits in the printed book. Footnotes get pulled into the body, page breaks vanish, and a quotation can no longer be cited to a page.
FixMyScan never reflows. It keeps every page as the original image, cleaned up, and adds text underneath. Page 214 stays page 214, footnotes stay at the foot of the page, and figures and tables stay where the author put them.
From grey scan to working copy
- Upload the PDF or DjVu file. Up to 1,000 pages.
- Set one crop for the whole book. Pages are layered so you can see the text block across all of them, and one box removes margins and copier edges everywhere.
- Download. The pages come back straight, the paper white and the text black, with every word searchable. Pages with figures, plates or maps are kept in greyscale so detail is not lost.
The language of the OCR is detected per book. It covers English, German, French, Latin, Italian and Spanish, and also Fraktur, the blackletter type of older German print, and Ancient Greek mixed with Latin, as in classical editions with apparatus.
Working with the cleaned PDF
In Zotero. Zotero extracts the text from PDFs for its full-text search. Attach the cleaned file and the whole book becomes searchable from your library alongside your articles.
Quoting. Select and copy text straight from the page. Always check a quotation against the image: OCR can misread rare words, diacritics, Greek accents and worn type.
On an e-reader. With the margins cropped, a monograph reads at normal size on a 7 to 10 inch screen. Send it to a Kindle through Send to Kindle, which takes PDFs up to 200 MB on its website and 50 MB by email. Check a file first with the free will it fit checker.
Annotating. On a Kindle Scribe, Amazon says handwriting works on PDFs, but not on PDFs loaded over USB-C. Send the file instead. reMarkable and Boox also let you write on an ordinary PDF.
What it will not do for you
- No reflow. If you want text that rewraps to any font size, you need an EPUB, and you lose the page.
- No two-column rearranging. A two-column journal page stays two columns.
- No text export. You get a PDF with hidden text, not a Word or plain text file.
- No handwriting. Marginalia, manuscripts and archival letters are not read.
- No translation. The text layer is in the book’s own language.
A word on rights
Use it on works you may copy: public-domain books, your own scans for private study where the law allows, or files supplied under your library’s terms. FixMyScan does not remove DRM, and it turns away encrypted PDFs.
Privacy
Unpublished or sensitive material is private to your account. Every upload is deleted 24 hours after the book is ready, or 24 hours after upload if you never convert it.
Cost
Plans are $9.99 a week or $79.99 a year, for unlimited books under fair use of 5,000 pages a week, one book at a time.
Not sure your PDF needs any of this? The free scanned PDF checker shows which pages already have text, without uploading the file.
Questions
Will page numbers still match the printed edition?
Yes. No page is moved, merged or dropped, so citations to the PDF match the print edition it was scanned from.
Can Zotero search my scanned PDF?
Zotero extracts the text already in a PDF for its full-text search. A scan without a text layer gives it nothing to index; after FixMyScan, every page has text.
Can I copy a quotation from the cleaned PDF?
Yes. Select the text and copy it. Check it against the page image, because OCR can misread rare words, accents and old type.
Does it handle footnotes and two-column pages?
Footnotes stay exactly where they are, because the page is not reflowed. Two-column pages are kept as they are; the layout is not changed for a small screen.
Can I annotate the book on a Kindle Scribe or reMarkable?
Yes. You get an ordinary PDF. On a Kindle Scribe, Amazon says handwriting works on PDFs sent with Send to Kindle, not those copied over USB-C.
Can I use it on library scans?
Use it on material you have the right to copy, such as public-domain works or scans made under your library's terms.
How long a book can I upload?
Up to 1,000 pages a book, as a PDF or DjVu file.