There are two main kinds of electronic book formats: image-based and text-based. The short answer to your question is that you want OCR software to convert the BookLiberator’s page images into pages of text.

Text-based books being with a typed version of a printed work; these are the sorts of e-books that organizations like Amazon and Project Gutenberg produce.

The image-based books are built from scans or photographs of actual book pages. To interact with picture-based books on an ebook reader you will generally want to convert them into text-based books. Otherwise you will have to scroll around on the page a lot, and current ereader screens refresh too slowly to make scrolling a pleasant way to read.

To convert page images to txt we use OCR software, which examines the page looking for text characters it can recognize. Since this process is not foolproof most large book scanning operations provide both OCR’d txt and page images you can use for verification. The Million Books and Google Books efforts are good examples of this.

For most books you can simply run OCR and read the text it outputs without much trouble. To illustrate, I ran the posted page image through a free software OCR tool called tesseract and posted the output below. Except for the two word chapter leed that they typset in small caps, it does a very respectable job.

“”"
PREFACE
AN 1ax1·iAus·r1v1a book on the subject of beards would
be as long as Ulyxres. The literature of the subject
is very extensive. The sixteenth, seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries saw the production of many
books and pamphlets relating to beards. Gentian
Hervet, for example, wrote three Latin discourses
on beards. In the first he takes a decided stand
against the beard; in the second he is lukewarm and
indifferent; in the third, having seen the error of
his former beliefs, he comes out wholeheartedly in
favor of the beard. And there is no doubt in my
mind that, like most persons who become interested
in this subject, he grew a beard himself and was
thereafter saved from having to retire, bleeding,
from the mirror after his morning toilet. Hervet’s
works and practically all of the earlier books were
concerned with the beard chiefly from a religious
viewpoint. The controversy between the Latin and
Greek churches over the beard and the many minor
disputes within and without the Church that grew
out of it, brought forth a mass of printed material.
There is a whole literature on the beards of the
“”"

And I think it can made in China.

bowerbird at aol dot com

-bowerbird