In time for the holidays, I assembled a custom book for my family. The collected war letters of my grandfather from World War II. This is how I used a variety of web services, mostly Amazon.com based, to achieve this.

1. Assembling a book, Amazonian style 1 Dan Vogel [email_address] [email_address] January 2009 1 Amazon affiliated person, using Amazon products, not an Amazon project or official in any way. All technologies and techniques used with publically available documentation and resources, for personal use, at published prices. I am not representing Amazon in any way, official or unofficial. Viewer discretion advised. No warrantees expressed or implied.

4. Source Material

7. Time to write letters home. Even on exciting bombing missions.

8. His grandmother collected letters sent to the family. They remained in a box for sixty-three years.

9. Acquisition

14. Image Reprocessing

15. Original Image Final Image

16. S3

17. S3 With S3, just save everything.

18. S3 Prep the image, or adjust it for another transformation attempt. Email it to scanR.

19. S3 scanR takes images and turns them into highly readable documents. scanR as an accessible web service… not so useable. scanR as an accessible email service… very useable.

20. S3

21. Image Organization

25. Layout

26. It felt like cheating by using Microsoft Word…

29. Print On Demand

33. Review

35. Fun Pictures

41. Thanks My grandfather, for the content and for being happy with the surprise. My wife, for putting up with my occasional need to work on this until 6am.

42. Thanks Geoff Froh of Denshō for the loan of the copy stand. scanR , for making a pretty great service at a very reasonable price Amazon.com…

43. Questions? [email_address] http://jvletters.transient.net/ for updates. Copies of the book are not yet available to the public.