Book Search, giving iPhone and Android users instant access to more
than 1.5 million public domain books. The works of authors such as
William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens were optimized
to be read on the small screen, a challenge the Google Book Search
team called "daunting" in a blog post announcing the launch:
There's an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so
many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you'll
notice that our previews are composed of page images made by
digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when
viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone's
small screen.
Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text
from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like
any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical
Character Recognition (or OCR for short).
However, as the team notes, there are frequently obstacles that keep
the printed word from being accurately extracted, such as smudges,
fancy fonts, old fonts, and torn pages. As an example of an "extreme
case," the team presented the this page image from Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures Under Ground:
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