And so it begins again.

We have finally got ourselves a begay (Ebay) account, this will be to buy things mind, I'm not confident enough to trade. 

What really sold it for me was browsing old books and such and seeing a two for one deal on Hardy Boys original stories.  For £20 we got ourselves The Tower Treasure and The Missing Chums, which when I'm done reading them will slowly start to transcribe.  Currently looking to buy 9 books as post book 24 there were only minor edits, which don't interest me.  I know its a lot of work but to hell with it, if a jobs worth doing its worth doing well.

Talking of transcription, we have been going through a bunch of PDF files of the original digest series.  That is books 1 - 57 starting either with the aforementioned Tower Treasure or if you are British The Aztec Warrior.  We used to get a bunch from the library in town and read them in one sitting,  Took about an hour, yeah my autism skill is being able to read like a demon.  Anyway transcription, those that are based on the original unrevised editions are a mess.

Formatting is all over the show, with some transcription errors (though going through the original Tower Treasure this is probably OCR'd with a really crappy printing.) with page titles kept in and some really terrible mistakes.  A few times I've had to change prank back to Frank and others I've had to infer what something meant by looking through the text for context.  We're currently doing The Great Airport Mystery, so expect a blog post on this soon with download.

I'll let you into a secret on how we actually do this: 

If you have a current Edition of Word / MS Office with a rolling subscription you can edit PDFs directly. And ignore the below suggestion.

If you are a cheapskate or are not on Windows, then you can import your PDF into Calibre and convert it to an RTF. file.  Then use whatever office soft you  have to edit the text. My pick is Libre Office which has never let me down. Whatever you use, these files are pretty much open to edit now so good luck and happy editing.