Books and Texts – Tips & Troubleshooting

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I want to scan a book. What resolution should I scan at?

Hi-resolution originals are always preferred.

We scan at 600dpi.

How do I embed a book?

On the item details page, click the Share icon.

A pop-up window will offer URLs for embedding.

For more advanced options click the Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! link at the bottom of the pop-up for more information.

  1. On the item details page click the share iconicon.png
  2. A popup window will appear with several share options.
  1. Select your preferred method of sharing (for example, FaceBook) and a link will automatically be generated.

Where are the hi-res images in an item?

All files for an item can be found on the ALL FILES page.

For books scanned by the Internet Archive, the largest compressed (tar or zip) file holds the original scans. You can usually download this file, expand it and use the images.

Where are the thumbnail images?

  1. In the book reader, click the thumbnails icon at the bottom of the page.

You will be able to view the book in thumbnails.

How do I make books flip right to left?

You can make books flip right to left by adding a metadata pair, page-progression=rl.

Use this click path starting at your item page:

Edit > change the information > Add another field > type page-progression in the left box and rl in the right box > click the Submit button.

How do I report that something’s wrong with a book?

Please send a description of the problem along with the URL of the page to info@archive.org. Thank you.

Please be aware that we typically do not modify the metadata of an item that has been created by a user of the site except at their request.

We recommend leaving a review on the page explaining the issue.

The uploader will automatically be notified.

For volume and serial work, the publish date often appears to be incorrect. This is because the metadata is populated by a MARC record from one of our partner libraries such as the Library of Congress. At this time, volume and serial works are considered to be a single work so there is a single MARC record for it. Typically the date that the first volume was published, is the only date in the record, so that is the date that will appear on all volumes of the work regardless of the date that might be printed in a particular volume.

Why won’t my uploaded file create a flip book?

There are a variety of reasons that your uploaded file(s) may not have properly created the files necessary for the online book reader such as, but not limited to:

  1. If you uploaded individual scan files, they may not have been properly formatted into a compressed file that is named [identifier]_images.zip (where [identifier] is the identifier of your item page.)
  2. The file(s) uploaded are corrupt or unreadable.
  3. The number of pages is too large and the derive task times out.
  4. The file name includes special characters or accented letters (please only use plain text, numbers, dashes and underscores for file names.)
  5. The uploaded pdf file is missing the format extension in the file name.
  6. The language is missing from the item’s metadata and the OCR module requires it.
  7. The derive task queue is backed up (please be patient).
  8. The dimensions in the pdf are not correct or within the acceptable size range.

Why is the OCR so bad? Why do the epub, mobi, text files have garbled or missing text?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is inexact. Sometimes it can be poor. It largely relies on factors of the physical book such as type font, color, cleanliness of the page, language (some are not OCRable at this time), and page orientation (sometimes charts are turned at 90°).

At this time we do not offer a way for you to either correct bad OCR or add your own corrected OCR file.

Several of the derived file formats such as mobi, EPUB and DjVu rely on OCR. So, if the OCR is poor, those files will also have garbled or misspelled words.

ReadAloud (Text-to-speech)

Why are the voices available for ReadAloud in the BookReader low quality?

The voices that BookReader uses for ReadAloud depend on the browser and computer you’re using. Different operating systems and browsers make different voices available. And you can also install more voices into your operating system.

  • Windows: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have the best voices.
  • Apple/Mac: All browsers have good voice options.
  • Linux: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have the best voice options. Firefox and other browsers rely on voices available to the operating system. Generally, few voices are included out of the box so you will have to install some voices if you want to use these browsers.
  • Android: All browsers have good voice options.
  • iPad/iPhone: All browsers have good voice options.

How can I install more voice options for ReadAloud?
On Windows, you can install new voices / languages for use in BookReader.