Read a scanned PDF as an ebook on your iPhone

A scan of a printed book is a stack of photographs of pages, with no text to select, search or resize. Peony can read those pages and turn them into an ebook.

How it works

When you add a PDF that has no text, Peony's converter first runs optical character recognition (OCR) with open-source software on this site's server. That gives every page a text layer. The recognised text then goes through the same conversion as any other PDF: paragraphs are rebuilt, headings and a contents list are found, and running headers and page numbers are removed. The result is a normal EPUB that you can resize, highlight and have read aloud.

Limits you should know about

English is the language the server recognises today.
Up to 600 pages, and up to 100 MB per file.
It takes a while: roughly a second or two per page, so a 300-page book can take around ten minutes. The work happens on the server, so you can leave the app and Peony picks the book up when you come back.
Quality follows the scan. Crooked, faint, skewed or noisy pages, handwriting and unusual fonts read worse, and you may see the odd wrong letter.
The page pictures are not kept in the EPUB, only the text. Photos and drawings on scanned pages are therefore not shown.
If the text cannot be recognised, the PDF simply opens as pages, as it would without conversion.

Tips for a better result

Scan at 300 dpi, in black and white or greyscale.
Keep the pages straight and flat, with even light and no shadow at the spine.
One page per image, and avoid cutting off the edges of the text.

What is sent

The scan is uploaded to the server, recognised and converted there, and deleted after the app has downloaded the EPUB, or within 24 hours at the latest. No account is needed. You can turn conversion off in Peony's settings, and then nothing is sent. See the privacy policy.

For PDFs that already contain text, read how the conversion to EPUB works.

Peony is on the App Store: get it for your iPhone.

More guides

Peony is an iPhone app for reading EPUB and PDF books you already own. See the home page, the FAQ and the privacy policy.