Book scanner for iPhone

How to scan a book with your iPhone using Scanfone

1. Open Scanfone and tap Scan to start the document camera.
2. Lay the book flat in good, even light and hold the iPhone straight above the page.
3. Capture the page. Apple's document camera finds the edges and fixes the perspective.
4. Turn the page and keep scanning. Every page goes into the same document.
5. Check the pages, rotate or reorder any that are off, and delete the blurry ones.
6. Pick a filter such as Gray or Black & white for crisp text.
7. Save the PDF. Text recognition runs on your phone, so you can search and copy the text.

A book scanner that lives in your pocket

Flatbed scanners and overhead book scanners are great if you have a desk, a power socket and a spare afternoon. Most of us just need ten pages from a library book, a chapter for a study group or a recipe from a cookbook that is too heavy to carry around. Your iPhone camera is more than good enough for that, as long as the app behind it straightens the page and makes the text readable.

Scanfone uses Apple's document camera to find the edges of each page and correct the perspective, so a page shot at a slight angle still comes out as a flat rectangle. You scan page after page into one document, and when you are done you have a single multi-page PDF instead of forty loose photos in your camera roll.

What you can do with scanned book pages

• Scan many pages into one PDF. Keep going until the chapter is done, then save it as one file.
• Make the PDF searchable. On-device text recognition (OCR) reads the words on every page, so you can search the PDF later.
• Copy quotes. Select text from a scanned page and paste it into your notes, an essay or a message.
• Export plain text. Turn the scan into a TXT file with PDF to text when you only need the words.
• Clean up the pages. Rotate, reorder and delete pages, and choose a filter: Original, Color, Gray or Black & white.
• Find it again. Search across all your documents, including the text inside them, and sort scans into folders by course or project.
• Share, print or save to Files. Send the PDF to classmates or keep it next to your other study material.

Tips for sharper book scans

Books fight back. The pages curve towards the spine, the paper is glossy and your own shadow lands right on the paragraph you need. A few small habits make a big difference:

• Use soft, even light. Daylight from a window is ideal. Avoid a single lamp right above the page, which causes glare on glossy paper.
• Flatten the page. Press the book open gently with your free hand at the edge, or put something heavy along the margins. Keep your fingers off the text.
• Hold the phone parallel to the page. The document camera fixes a lot of perspective, but a straight shot is still the sharpest.
• Scan one page at a time for thick books. Near the spine the text bends. Moving the camera closer to one page keeps the lines straight and the OCR more accurate.
• Pick Gray or Black & white for text. These filters make printed text crisp and keep the file smaller. Use Color for pages with photos or diagrams.
• Check before you save. Delete blurry shots and rescan them while the book is still open in front of you.

Free means free, even on page 300

Plenty of scanner apps are happy to let you scan a whole chapter and then reveal, at the save button, that exporting is a premium feature. Some add weekly plans or a watermark across your page. That is a rough surprise after twenty minutes of careful page turning.

Scanfone does not do that. Scanning, saving, sharing, printing and text recognition are free and unlimited, with no ads, no account and no paywall when you save. Free PDFs get one small line under each page that says "Scanned free with Scanfone". Nothing is placed over your text. If you want that line gone, plus sync between your phones and a 1 TB cloud backup, Scanfone Pro costs $2.99 for the first year and then $19.99 a year. There are no weekly plans and you can cancel in one tap.

Your pages stay on your phone

Scanning and OCR happen on your iPhone. Nothing is uploaded unless you turn on Pro sync, and Scanfone shows no ads and uses no tracking or analytics. That matters when the pages are your own notebooks, a diary or a draft you are not ready to share. For anything really private, the Safe keeps documents in a folder locked with a PIN and Face ID.

A quick, fair note on copyright: scanning a book for your own study or reference is one thing, sharing a full copy of someone else's book is another. Check the rules where you live and respect the author.

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