Book digitization
I began scanning some of my paper reference books in an attempt to digitize them for better search quite early when I purchased the then-expensive Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 book scanner.
Book digitization is not something for the impatient. Countless hours have been spent on this.
There are some reference books that are simply a lost cause in digitizing. Take this book, 萬用英文手冊 as an example: Its frameless tabular print layout is anathema to even the most capable OCR tool there is. Scanning the book in, say, half an hour only gets 1% of the work done. The subsequent OCR with a huge amount of manual adjustment required is clearly not worth carrying out.
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Luckily, all is not lost on other books.