Read a scanned PDF on your Kindle

What your Kindle does with a scanned page

A scanned book is a stack of photographs, one per page, wrapped in a PDF. Your Kindle keeps each photo whole and scales it until it fits the screen. It can’t pick the words out and set them in a bigger font, the way it does with a Kindle book, because to the Kindle there are no words, only pixels.

So the size of the text depends on two things: how big the screen is, and how much of each photo is margin.

Your screen against a printed page

Amazon gives these screen sizes on its own pages:

A common paperback page is 6 × 9 inches, which is about 10.8 inches corner to corner. Put that page on a 6-inch screen and it shrinks to a little over half its printed size. On a 7-inch Paperwhite it comes out at about two thirds. Only the 11-inch Scribe shows a page that size close to life size, which is why we cover it on its own page: scanned PDFs on Kindle Scribe.

Those figures assume the scan is just the page. Most scans also carry a border of desk or scanner lid, a dark edge, and the grey shadow of the spine, and every bit of that shrinks the type further.

Four things that make a scan hard to read on a Kindle

• Margins. The printed margin, plus anything extra the scanner caught, takes screen space the text could have had.
• Grey paper. Old paper photographs as grey, beige or yellow. An e-ink screen has only shades of grey to work with, so pale print on grey paper turns muddy.
• No text layer. Without OCR, you can’t search the book, highlight a line or tap a word for the dictionary.
• Size. Grey page photos are heavy. A long book can pass Amazon’s email limit, and the biggest pass the web limit too.

Getting the PDF onto the Kindle

Amazon gives you three ways in, each with its own ceiling:

Amazon doesn’t publish a size limit for the Send to Kindle phone and desktop apps on their download pages, so we don’t quote one.

Amazon’s product pages list PDF twice: once as a format Kindles open natively, and once as a format it can convert. For a scanned book, keep it a PDF. Conversion works from the text inside the file, and a scan without OCR has none to work from. Even with OCR, a reflowed scan tends to drop lines and lose its page numbers.

How to make a scanned book readable on Kindle

1. Upload the scan to FixMyScan. A PDF or DjVu file, up to 1,000 pages.
2. Draw one crop. You see 50 pages laid over each other, so the printed block of the whole book shows up at once. Draw the box just outside it, past the spine shadow.
3. Let it clean the pages. Text pages become black type on white. Pages with pictures stay greyscale so the pictures survive. Tilted pages are straightened and two-page spreads are split.
4. Let it add the text layer. Every page is read and hidden text goes underneath, in 19 languages including English, German, French, Latin, Italian and Spanish, plus Fraktur and Ancient Greek.
5. Download the PDF and send it. Use the Send to Kindle website for anything over 50 MB.

The page order and page numbers stay as printed, so references and the index still work.

Reading tips once it’s on the Kindle

Best suited for: the 6-inch Kindle and the 7-inch Paperwhite, where the crop makes the biggest difference.

• Crop tightly for novels. Running heads and wide margins add nothing when you read straight through.
• Keep page numbers for study. If you cite the book or use its index, leave the numbers inside the crop.
• Open a page with footnotes and one with a picture first. That tells you straight away whether the crop kept everything you need.

If the text is still too small after all that, the type itself may be tiny. PDF text too small goes through what’s left to try.

What FixMyScan won’t do

It won’t turn the scan into a Kindle book with adjustable fonts. Your book stays a PDF, with every page, picture and footnote where the printer put it. It doesn’t read handwriting either.

FixMyScan is not affiliated with Amazon.

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