How to Scan a Book Into a PDF With Your Phone (Free)

How to scan a book into a PDF

1. 1 Prepare the book. Use even, bright light and keep the page flat. Avoid shadows from your phone and from the spine.
2. 2 Open your phone’s scanner. On iPhone: Notes → new note → camera button → Scan Documents. On Android: Google Drive → tap + → Scan.
3. 3 Scan page by page. Capture each page (or each two-page spread, if you prefer) and keep going until the section is done. The scanner saves the batch as one PDF.
4. 4 Merge the batches. If you scanned the book in several sessions, open the Merge tool, add the PDFs and put them in book order.
5. 5 Clean up. Delete blank or duplicate pages with Delete Pages and fix sideways pages with Rotate.
6. 6 Reduce the size if needed. Run the result through Compress and check the before-and-after size.

Scan quality vs. file size

A scanned book is a stack of photos, so it can get big quickly. PDFDistrict’s Compress rebuilds the file structure and does not recompress images, so on a file made entirely of scanned images it may barely change the size. If size matters, choose a lower scan quality in your scanning app before you scan, or read how to reduce PDF size on your phone.

Scan only what you’re allowed to

Copyright rules vary by country. Scan books you own for personal use, public-domain works or material you have permission to copy.

PDFDistrict is a free, browser-based PDF toolkit that processes files locally — files are never uploaded.

Frequently asked questions

How do I scan a book into a PDF with my phone?

Use Notes on iPhone or Google Drive on Android to scan each page, then merge the PDFs in order with PDFDistrict’s Merge tool and compress the result if needed.

How do I combine all my scanned pages into one PDF?

Open the Merge tool, add all the scan files, drag them into book order and click Merge PDFs.

Why is my scanned PDF so big?

Each page is an image. Scanning at a lower quality gives smaller files; PDFDistrict Compress does not recompress images, so it helps little on image-only PDFs.

Are my scans uploaded when I use PDFDistrict?

No. Merging, deleting pages, rotating and compressing all run in your browser.