[story time] Digitizing an Old Book: My New Volunteer Project

Twenty years ago, on a summer day, a book as thick as a brick landed in the living room of my maternal grandmother’s house, 40 To Hien Thanh Street, Hanoi. She used to exchange books with her literate, French-speaking friends. One of her friends, after buying this book fresh off the press, hurried to show it to her. Who was this gentleman? I can’t remember anymore.

Even though I was used to seeing new books arrive every week, this was the first time I took an interest. Usually, the books were in French, but this time it was in Vietnamese, huge, impossible to miss. Finally, a book I could understand!

The turquoise cover was in very bad taste, the title meant nothing to me, but as I flipped through the first few pages, I was completely captivated and read several chapters straight through. A history book this exciting? I’d never seen anything like it!

My grandmother didn’t seem to share my opinion, because the book went back to its owner as quickly as it had arrived and never reappeared at our house. All I could remember was (1) its title (2) that it existed.

I never forgot it.

From time to time, while browsing Facebook groups for book lovers, I’d ask if anyone had it at home… Some had heard of it, others had read it but no longer had it. Over the years, I managed to gather a few more details:

• The book was printed in an edition of only a few thousand copies, hence its rarity
• There’s a copy at the National Library in Hanoi, another in Ho Chi Minh City, and three copies in three libraries in the United States
• The book is riddled with typos
• Three chapters are missing from the first edition, not due to censorship but due to negligence

In May 2021, completely by chance, a Vietnamese man contacts me on Facebook to ask about my e-reader/tablet for writing reMarkableOne thing leads to another, we hit it off, and he reveals a “secret” to me: he’s 100% equipped to digitize any book and turn it into an e-book using automatic character recognition (OCR software). He’s managed to digitize his entire library, made up of very old books as well as recently released ones—whose digital versions don’t exist yet. It’s a secret because he doesn’t share his library with anyone. At that moment, I had no intention of digitizing anything, but I’m naturally curious, so I ask him all the technical questions that come to mind, and he reveals that in Vietnam, digitized books are scarce, but there are plenty of volunteers who do the same as he does—some translate entire novels into Vietnamese—but they share ebooks for free online, and I should take a look to find Vietnamese books I can’t buy from abroad. Finally, he offers me a digitized version of a book I’ve been after, which has only been released in print so far and which he had just scanned—with the promise that I’d buy the ebook when it becomes available. I did a few weeks later.

In September 2021, I happen to stumble upon a book-sharing group and I ask my usual question: “Does anyone have book XYZ at home?”

The answer I’d been waiting for for years arrives: “Yes, me! I have it as a scan.”

My hands shaking, I’m so close to my goal that I message him immediately.

“It’s late, let’s talk about it tomorrow!”

In agony and insomnia, I wait impatiently for the next day. Is it the first edition, missing three chapters? Is his scan complete and good quality?

A private discussion follows where he wants to know my intentions before giving me the scan. I tell him I’ve been searching for this book for 20 years. I know many others are in the same boat, so I promise him to digitize the book, correct the typos, and distribute it for free in digital format.

He sends me the cover. His scan is of the second edition—no missing chapters. The book was scanned with a quality printer/scanner. It’s a sign!

However, the book is 1,300 pages long.

The days that followed were long, full of doubt and sweat.After my workday, I started another one, immediately diving into the digitization project from 7 PM to midnight, and all weekend, for three weeks straight. The digitization steps are numerous and worthy of a publishing house’s process.

1. Recover the scans (images) and sort them in the right order (here, I’m grateful he sent me images instead of a PDF, which makes sorting easier. One page = one image)
2. Use software for character recognition (OCR, I use ABBYY FineReaderwhich works very well with Vietnamese)
3. The layout needs to be redone completely because, to avoid errors, it’s better to export the OCR text as a .txt file rather than a .doc with its broken layout
4. The text is then put into a Word file; it’s the simplest method
5. The footnotes need to be redone entirely
6. Typos (which take the most time): OCR has its limits, there are numerous errors. Moreover, the original book itself has typos. I therefore have to compare the text with the scan, but also step back from the original text (scanned version) to better spot the errors.
   1. I use both Word & Google Docs to catch basic errors. Since the text is too long, I have to upload 2 chapters at a time to Google Docs, otherwise it crashes
   2. I then reread the entire text twice to correct mistakes, both on my e-reader reMarkable (easier to correct with the stylus) and on the computer (zooming in 8x to better see the errors)
   3. The new “split screen” feature on the iPad lets me compare the scan with the digitized version at the same time, which is super handy.
   4. I divide the book into several parts and ask other volunteers to read them too, using “track changes” in Word to flag any errors they spot.

After 3 weeks, the book is finally ready! To export it to a digital format, I use the software Calibre, which lets me add a cover, a description, and export in various formats. For this one, I mainly offer the Kindle-compatible formats: awz3, mobi. Epub for e-readers like Kobo, reMarkable. And a PDF version for those reading on their phone, with generous spacing and font size. Everything is carefully considered to provide the best reading experience possible.

JB doesn’t understand why I’m doing this. I admit I’m not exactly sure what drives me to spend my days and nights on it.

I think the time the author spent writing this book is immense, and someone really should dedicate themselves to making it known, so it doesn’t go to waste.

The book came out too early, the content was too daring for the time, and the vocabulary too difficult—that’s why it mainly sat in the libraries of scholars, who would never have thought to digitize anything. But times have changed. Thanks to footnotes, difficult words can be explained, the risqué passages are tamer than a Sunday TV movie, and, most importantly, with the digital version, everyone can finally access it.

During the first proofread, a historical figure mentioned in the book caught my eye. The more I read, the more I think we might be related. We share the same last name. It’s not a rare surname in Vietnam, but it’s not common either. I call my parents, who don’t even know about my project, and ask if we are descendants.

My dad says, “yes, we come from that branch!” and tells me how a great-uncle, passionate about genealogy, managed to trace our lineage back to that era and confirmed that we share the same family tree as that famous figure.

Why did it take so long to find this out? Why put so much effort into digitizing and proofreading such a long and difficult book? That’s the reason!

Deep down, I know that despite many digitization projects, volunteers have their limits, and I’m probably the best suited to digitize this one, driven by a long wait of 20 years.

Unfortunately, I can’t share the book with you because it’s still under copyright. But I dare to digitize it because I think it’s necessary, as no Vietnamese publisher will do it, out of laziness (they can’t even be bothered to proofread the print edition for typos). I also wrestle with whether to include my email—to receive feedback on typos. Is it really necessary? In the end, I’ll remain anonymous, and no one will know, when reading the ebook, that I’m the one who digitized it.

Now that the project is done, I feel complete satisfaction, but also a lot of apprehension, as if it were my own book—even though I didn’t write it…