I know there are many articles available on the Internet about how to download preview pages from Google Books.
But here I am going to show you how to not just download the preview pages for reading, but you can even edit the text.
After downloading the preview pages, you use a free OCR ( Optical Character Recognition) software where you can edit the words.
This is for those of you who want to copy the original preview text on to your Notepad and then have it rewritten to your own preference.
In other words, you can convert the text from an image into an editable text document. It saves you time.
Here is the full tutorial:
Step One: Install Google Books Downloader Lite
1. Download the free Google Books Downloader Lite For Windows over here.
2. A box will pop up as shown below:
3. After installing it, you should see its icon of a blue color book on your desktop as shown below:
Step Two: How To Download Preview Pages From Google Books
1. Double click on the blue book icon.
2. A box will pop up as shown below:
By default, as you can see the Output Format is set in PDF, the Resolution is set as 800px and the Output Folder is set at Desktop. You can change them to your requirement.
3. Go to Google Books. Select the book you want to download which has Preview pages. Click on Preview.
4. Copy the preview book Web address into the “Google Book URL” box.
5. For this tutorial we want to convert the preview words into a text document. You need to set the Output Format as JPEG. For those of you who just want to read, then you can let it be as PDF format.
6. Click the “Start” button and it will begin to download.
7. Once it has finished, a small box will pop up with the word “Done“. Click the “OK” button as shown below:
8. You can see the saved folder in pdf on your desktop of your computer.
9. Even it is saved in PDF format, you CANNOT edit the text. You need to convert it into a text document.
Step Three: How To Convert It Into Text Document
1. Go this free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool at: http://www.free-ocr.com/
2. You can see the boxed area titled “Upload images for OCR“.
3. Click on “Browse” and then click on the newly downloaded folder on your desktop. Select just one page from the folder. Then click “Open“. (you can only convert one page at a time.)
4. Type in the captcha text as provided.
5. Now click on “Send File” button.
6. Wait for it to upload and process.
7. Once it has done, you can see the texts in the box titled: “Text recognition result” as shown below.
8. Now the text in the box can be copied and paste on your Notepad to be edited.
*Note: Sometimes certain pages might not convert. What you need to do is to you have to crop away the white spaces around the words.
*Warning: You can use some the original sentences from the Preview pages , but do not plagiarize.
* Here is another method on how to download and convert Google Books Preview pages into a document text.