10 Ways to Find a Book Typing Job from Home

The demand for book typing jobs from home is on the rise and is unlikely to wane any time soon.

We have digitization to thank for that.

Records, texts, data, and all sorts of information that exist only as analog or hard copies are being converted into digital formats. The trend toward digitization has been embraced across all industries, but none more so than publishing.

Consider this: publishing is a centuries-old industry, while electronic book publishing began in earnest only with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle in 2007. They have some catching up to do.

Some publishing houses are still sitting on large caches of backlist titles and archived issues of magazines, many of them out of print and no longer available from any other source.

The best way to convert them to passive-income-generating e-books and even audiobooks is to make them available in a digital format and discoverable to their target audience.

For e-books, this is done by manually transcribing the text and reproducing it as a digital file. Optical character recognition (OCR) scanning, which converts scanned physical documents into editable text, cannot be counted on for high-quality results. It is still an imperfect technology.

Fortunately, authors and other publishers can outsource this service to professionals who can help make their masterpieces available and accessible in digital forms.

What are Book Typing Jobs?

Book typing may be classified under the bigger umbrella of data entry, where information is reproduced from one format to another. In book typing, that is converting traditional books into digital text files.

Other common data entry jobs include:

• Transcription: converting audio into text
• Medical billing: converting hardcopy bills into digital versions
• Captioning: providing text for real-time audio and video formats

Book typing jobs are not limited to commercially published fiction and nonfiction books. This could also involve typing up handwritten journals, manuals, texts in images, old manuscripts, speeches, and personal documents like letters.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of projects you may encounter in work-from-home book typing:

• A pharmaceutical company is looking to dispose of its physical library and decides to outsource the typing of its books, manuscripts, journals, and other text-based documents to a third-party service provider. Because it will involve technical terms and medical jargon, this type of project is best suited for a reputable medical transcription company.
• A motivational speaker wants to be inclusive to the deaf community and hires a virtual assistant to transcribe their speaking engagements, seminars, speeches, and other audio or video-based content and make it available as books.
• A law firm wants its case files uploaded into the cloud. After scanning all their documents, they find that image versions are too limiting. Converting these into text files means it can be searched for keywords — something they cannot do on an image-based document. This type of project will usually be handled by a legal transcription company.

Book Typing Job Requirements

Book typing lends itself well to a home-based setup.

There is no formal educational requirement for this job. You don’t need specialized training to excel at it, nor do you need expensive software and equipment.

What you need instead is a reliable PC or a laptop, and a work area conducive to productivity.

As for skills, you will need an above-average typing speed and the diligence to read through plenty of material. It also helps to have proficiency in proofreading and, depending on what you are working on, some technical background.

10 Ways to Find Book Typing Jobs from Home

Here’s the tricky part. Almost all legitimate data entry companies can accommodate book typing requests and it may go by many names, like copy typing, book transcribing, and many more. Searching for “book typing jobs from home” will yield pages upon pages of results for general online typing jobs.

To exclude overlapping results for transcription and data entry jobs, you’ll need to try out other keywords to narrow down the search results.

Here are some tried and tested websites that will help get you started on your search.

1. FlexJobs

This job board is a must for any work-from-home freelancers. If you’re interested in online book typing jobs, enter “typing” on the search bar to see which opportunities are available. Bookmark this site and check regularly for fresh job postings.

You do need to experiment with keywords since getting exact-match results for the phrase “book typing jobs from home” is quite rare.

Don’t forget to tick “100% remote work” on the Remote Work Level filter to further narrow down the results.

2. QuickTranscriptionService.com

This US-based company provides various transcription services across several states. One of the services on offer is book typing.

They hire part-time and full-time transcription service providers from anywhere in the world.

While they don’t disclose payment terms for their employees, their published rate for their clients for book typing jobs is $2.63 per page. That should give you an idea of how much you can earn by typing books online for this company.

3. Freelancer.com

This website has been around for years and is still incredibly popular. It’s home to almost every job request you can imagine. As such, you’re bound to find book typing jobs here.

Do note that Freelancer.com is a bidding jobs site, so competition for work is always high, especially for entry-level jobs. While past clients can give you first dibs on future projects, landing your first job on Freelancer.com might take some time.

Payment for book typing jobs will also depend on the client. The project budget will be posted along with job details, so proceed only with applying only if the fees are acceptable to you.

4. Fiverr.com

Fiverr.com is the better alternative to Freelancer.com, especially if you’re looking for more control fee-wise.

This is because Fiverr.com lets freelancers post the services they offer, including details and pricing, which is visible to everyone. If a client wants to hire a certain freelancer, the order button is right there.

It will be up to you to find ways to stand out, showcase your skills, and promote your data entry, transcription, or book typing services.

5. Upwork

Upwork is one of the most popular and established global job boards for freelancers. Anyone can post a job ad for free.

Aside from the specifics of the job, these ads would usually include the project budget. Jobseekers may send proposals with their own rates. It’s not open bidding like in Freelancer since the proposals are not public.

One of the best things about Upwork is its proactive anti-fraud measures that protect both freelancers and employers.

For instance, payments will be put in escrow once a contract has begun and will be released only upon completion of the project or a milestone.

6. 3PlayMedia

This company hires online transcriptionists, English/Spanish voice transcribers and real-time closed captioners as independent contractors.

3PlayMedia is a Boston-based company, but they hire anyone willing to work remotely and in-house. When hired, you can set your own working hours and just turn in your work before deadline.

According to Glassdoor, employees here earn an average of $18 to $19 per hour.

7. Rev

Rev offers a number of client services, such as translation, captioning, subtitles, and transcription.

You have to pass a qualifier exam to join Rev. Once you’re in, you can commit to as many assignments as you’d like.

Payment ranges from $24 to $39 per audio hour. It is estimated that the average Rev transcriptionist earns about $245 a month, depending on how many assignments one accepts.

8. CastingWords

This company offers transcription services (turning audio files to text).

To join, fill out a form with your personal details. CastingWords require applicants to join their workshop and pass their transcription test (you’re going to transcribe a short audio file).

If your test is accepted, you can accept any job posted in their workshop, as long as you follow their style guide for every project.

The pay varies. Quality control agents will score your submissions, which then affects your pay.

9. Tigerfish

Since 1989, Tigerfish has been helping clients with video productions, legal proceeding transcriptions, medical dictations and notes, corporate transcription, academic lectures, and other similar projects .

Tigerfish does not publish the pay rate of its contractors, but Glassdoor reports that transcriptionists earn half a penny per word.

The company hires entry-level transcriptionists as well as seasoned transcriptionists.

Note that the job page may show that they’re currently not hiring transcribers, but this often opens up multiple times each year, so it’s worth checking back on this page.

10. Start Your Own Book Typing Business from Home

Here’s the thing, book typing work-from-home job opportunities are hiding in plain sight.

Almost all businesses across all sectors use some kind of book typing service. How else do PDFs and image-scanned books, and other paper documents become available as digital copies?

Not all businesses will have the manpower to handle this task in-house. They will look to outsource this service to an independent contractor or to an agency that offers book typing services.

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for book typing jobs online, you may encounter two kinds of people:

• Scammers who prey on people looking for data entry and typing jobs. There is a great demand for this service and many freelancers looking to get into it, so it’s rife with opportunism.
• Lowballing clients or agencies who price these job requests way beneath the time and effort it will take to complete it.

The surest way to avoid book typing scams and bad deals is to put up your own book typing business and offer this specific service to prospective clients. As a business owner, you have control over every aspect of your business, from pricing, promotion, to the kinds of projects you’ll accept.

Setting up a business website is easy; even newbies can get a business website up and running in a day, thanks to ready-made templates.

How Much Can You Earn from Book Typing?

For this type of job, you will most likely get paid for your output rather than on an hourly basis. The amount you earn from typing old books depends on several factors.

If you join a company as a freelancer, you’d probably earn somewhere from $1 to $5 per page of the book typed. The rate largely depends on the length and complexity of the material.

If you offer your typing services to sites like Fiverr, then the rate depends entirely on you. This is also the case for people planning to put up their book typing business. You’ll dictate the fees you’re willing to work for.

Payment terms vary as well. For instance, jobs posted on Freelancer,  Fiverr, and Upwork are paid after tasks are completed, while transcription companies may pay their contractors on a weekly or bimonthly basis.

If you’re interested in other opportunities like these that are simple and non-stressful, here’s a list of jobs that pay weekly you should look into.

The Future: Digitizing Books

The quality of retyped books is higher than OCR scanning, but as technology catches up with the need to digitize old books and manuscripts, you might want to learn how to digitize books aside from typing them out.

Learn how to classify and organize books digitally so that publishers and authors can access them easily.

Study how to handle fragile old books and scan microfilm so you can offer your services to libraries and widen your pool of potential target customers.

Familiarize yourself with the latest developments in digital publishing, indexing, applying metadata, and cataloging so you can convert physical books into electronic ones that are easily accessible and searchable via keywords, whatever eBook format a reader uses.

The more you know about digitizing books, the more clients you can get and the more you can expect to make per hour from your added expertise.

The Bottom Line

As far as work-from-home jobs go, book typing has many advantages.

The requirements are simple and your earning potential is directly proportional to your skill, speed, and effort you put in.

If you’re a good typist, you enjoy reading, and you prefer working independently, you may find this to be a non-stressful and even fairly easy way to earn money. Head over to these specific guides – medical billing jobs, transcription jobs, and closed-caption jobs – if you’re interested in one of these specializations.

If you’re serious about pursuing a book typing job that you can do from the comfort of your own home, we hope this guide helps get you started.