vFlat
Your phone transformed into a powerful book scanner
vFlat introduction
So let’s say your kid is learning a foreign language. You’ve tapped into the awesome power of one-on-one teaching through iTalki or Preply or Zoom. Your kid has spent a couple of years with online one-on-one lesson providers like LingoBus, Wukong, LingoAce, GoEast, and Motherly Notes, and is becoming a proficient reader. Wow, this language learning thing is going great!
Of course, you want to practice reading your target language more. Your kid just bought an awesome novel-length book that they’re excited about, but it’s a little advanced, a real challenge for their ability. It will help if an online teacher reads the book with them, providing just enough help to facilitate your learner’s reading.
There’s just one problem. Your kid and your kid’s book is here. Your kid’s online teacher is there, 10,000 miles away, teaching online from Taipei, or Xinhua, or Taitung, or the middle of Hunan Province. Whatcha gonna do? A great little app called vFlat has your back.
What is vFlat?
vFlat is an app for Android and Apple iOS devices that turns your phone or tablet into an awesome document scanner for books, paper, and flat art. You simply take pictures of each page of the book, and vFlat will magically transform your physical book into a single paginated PDF, or a sequence of JPG images.
vFlat does all sorts of cool software tricks to save you a lot of time, and turn your pictures into a professional-looking scan. vFlat’s auto-capture feature automatically takes a picture as soon as it detects the boundaries of a page. If you use vFlat to scan books, the app will automatically crop to only include the page image, and will remove any page curvature or distortion of the text. If images of your hands sneak into the images because you were holding the book flat, it will remove those, too. Sorcery!
vFlat allows you to take one picture of two facing pages, speeding the scanning process. vFlat takes all of these cleaned-up images and assembles them into one gloriously cohesive paginated PDF file. vFlat can also export the corrected page images as JPG images.
vFlat can optionally perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the completed document so that the text of the scanned book becomes searchable and copy-able. This OCR works well for Simplified and Traditional Chinese Hanzi characters.
I’ve tested a bunch of book-scanning apps. vFlat is by far the most successful in correcting the curvature of book pages and doing accurate OCR off of those corrected pages. A bit of Googling suggests that the developers of vFlat are resourceful adopters of the latest software engineering tools and methodologies.
How long does it take to scan an entire book using vFlat?
Scanning short picture books with vFlat takes just a few minutes. In my experience, scanning a book that’s novel-length will require about 15 minutes for you to take all of the page images, and then just a few minutes to use the software to build a finalized PDF.
How do you get PDFs to your online tutor or teacher?
For a one-on-one online language class through a provider like iTalki, you may not need to send the PDF of a book to your teacher at all. Using the iTalki software, Google Meet, or Zoom, it is possible for a student to share their screen with a teacher, and vice versa.
If you do want the teacher to have whatever PDF you’ve created using vFlat for the purposes of teaching your learner, and you are comfortable that it is legal to do so, you can simply send it to your teacher by e-mail, send it via apps like WeChat or Line, or transfer it via links from Cloud services like Microsoft OneDrive.
What are all the ways you use vFlat, Tigerdaddy?
One of my primary uses of vFlat is to facilitate online language lessons. vFlat makes it simple for a student and an online teacher to share a book and read collaboratively. It usually isn’t necessary to give the teacher the PDF file. The student can simply share their screen during their online lesson. The PDF format provides the teacher and student an easy way to see and navigate the contents of the book, versus trying to hold a physical book up to a webcam. A PDF’s paginated sequential format is much easier for young learners to handle than a collection of page images. The kids just scroll as necessary.
I often recommend vFlat to my kids’ teachers who express interest. The teacher will use it to organize teaching materials for their classes.
I also find myself using vFlat to quickly copy a picture book or short chapter book in cases when we’re going on a weekend trip or to a boring appointment. We’ll copy it to one of the many tablet computers lying around our house. This helps me keep sets intact and avoids the risk of damage to expensive, rare, or out-of-print books.
My older son is no longer in a formal K-12 Mandarin Immersion program, but when he was, he often brought home paper handouts and worksheets intended to practice various aspects of Mandarin Chinese. My Chinese is lousy and my ability to help my son was limited. vFlat was one way I could easily and effectively pass those materials along to an online teacher or tutor for additional help.
What are some other things you can do with vFlat?
vFlat will scan any flat art you want, fix flaws in the images, and combine those images into a single PDF. You could use the app in a variety of ways:
- Combining many pictures of your child’s artwork into one PDF “book.”
- Combining pictures of notes, brochures, and ticket stubs you collected on a trip into one PDF e-book for later trip planning purposes, or as a momento.
- Take pictures of many receipts and combine them into one PDF book for expensing and reimbursement purposes.
- Organize a bunch of handwritten notes into one cohesive PDF file. A student could organize a semester’s worth of class notes this way.
Can vFlat scan in color?
Yes. Note that the “Settings” screen has an option marked “Enhance Colors.” If you find the colors are harsh or overly contrasty for a particular book, you may want to turn this option off.
Can I set the quality level?
You can adjust the quality level of the finished PDF for your needs. Higher-quality settings will generally result in larger PDF files.
Is copying books with vFlat legal?
I’m not a lawyer. If you want an authoritative answer to questions about this you might want to consult with an attorney specializing in copyright law, or read the laws of your particular locality carefully. The right answer is going to depend a lot on what book you’re copying, what you intend to do with that copied book, and what country you live in.
With that said, if you are American, and you are considering the scenario of studying a physical book that you already own with an online teacher in a one-on-one class, it is worth studying the provisions of US law pertaining to Fair Use. American copyright law grants broad exemptions for “educational use”, “personal use” and uses that do not materially affect the marketplace.
This webpage from Penn State offers a good overview of the relevant law for American readers. This page suggests some of the unresolved aspects of case law pertaining to digital conversions of physical books, and the distribution of those digital conversions. In general copyright law is more lenient concerning personal, educational use, but quickly becomes less lenient if you publicly post or distribute copies of books in any way.
Many books and articles are in the public domain and aren’t subject to any copyright considerations at all. You can generally copy and distribute these works to your heart’s content.
Why haven’t I heard of vFlat?
One reason you may never have heard of vFlat is because vFlat doesn’t appear to have any kind of “affiliate” program for website owners. Many companies offer reviewers like me a cash percentage or other valuable kickbacks for encouraging sales of their software. Not surprisingly, these incentives encourage a lot of reviews of certain well-known apps and websites.
vFlat doesn’t appear to have any affiliate program for website owners. I will earn nothing from vFlat for this review. I’m telling you about it because vFlat is really useful, and because I think it may help you in your language learning journey.
vFlat sounds great. How much does it cost?
vFlat is distributed in two ways, a free edition and a “Premium” version. The differences between the two are summarized in this chart:
As you can see, the free edition of vFlat is limited to the point that it is really only useful for trying out the software and figuring out if it will work for your needs. The Premium version of vFlat is sold on a subscription basis. At present (December 2024) it is $37.99 a year.
In general I really dislike apps with recurring subscription fees, but vFlat is so useful that I make an exception for it.
How do I get vFlat?
You can download the free version of vFlat from your app store of choice. If you decide you want to subscribe to vFlat, there’s an in-app upgrade to Premium:
vFlat summary
vFlat is an essential tool for language learners, and the parents who help them in their learning journey. vFlat enables you to quickly make a PDF copy of any physical book simply by whipping out your phone. It also allows a fast and easy way to share worksheets, written assignments, and other printed paperwork with online tutors.
I didn’t get into the details of it in this article, but vFlat can also effectively facilitate solo guided reading practice of characters, words, and entire books for learners of any ability. The interesting details of that process of guided reading will be the topic of a future post on tigerba.com.
Disclosures on referrals
The integrity of my reviews and recommendations on tigerba.com matter to me. I paid for vFlat using my own money. I have not been approached by vFlat to write this review, nor have I been compensated in any way in advance of its publication. Indeed this review will come as a surprise to the makers of vFlat.
Some people attempt to make a low-level business shilling various online education programs. As a website owner, you can earn referral bonuses from companies by steering readers to buy stuff. The availability of these referral bonuses is one reason that there are so many short, superficial reviews of language learning apps online — there is some money to be made.
Picking up spare change from the language learning community isn’t really my motivation for writing any of this up. What I most value through writing are the connections I make in the language learning community. Those connections will help me teach both of my children Mandarin Chinese more effectively.
That all said, there are referral links in the review above. If you purchase through the links above, some of the companies mentioned in my review (but not vFlat) may eventually send me some money, or perhaps some free lessons for Sam方平山 and Thomas小方糖. This doesn’t cost you anything. Any money I make from referrals will go to pay the many bills for this website. To date I have spent thousands of dollars setting up this website, buying future-looking website plug-ins, and paying for website hosting. At present, tigerba.com is a money-losing enterprise and I’m perfectly happy with that. But tigermama虎妈 tells me it would be a nice thing to offset a few of its costs.
Disclosures on AI and plagiarism
I like the process of writing in the old-fashioned way and don’t presently use any form of AI to write my articles.
From time to time I’ve heard of minor scandals involving alleged plagiarism between competitor language learning blogs. I’ve solved that potential problem by generally not reading other language learning blogs.
Avoiding other people’s writing about Chinese language learning helps me to keep my writing, my coverage, and my perspective fresh. I can write freely without worrying that I may have inadvertently borrowed someone else’s ideas, language, priorities, coverage, or point of view.
Thank you for your generosity and time in sharing, Ken!
Thank you for your generosity and time in sharing, Ken!
Thank you for the great write up. Please do let us know if vFlat allows for lifetime subscription as my aversion for subscriptions is what is stopping me from using this extensively at the moment.
Hi! I will contact the company on your behalf and see if a lifetime subscription is an option. In my experience, companies sometimes offer these subscriptions to customers who require them (e.g. government contracts). They often don’t openly advertise these lifetime subscriptions since they would prefer the recurring revenue.