Scrape text from scanned books

Scraping text from scanned books involves Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — converting images of text into machine-readable text. Here’s how to do it:

1. Convert Scanned Pages to Text (OCR Method)

Tools and Software Options

• Tesseract OCR (Free & Open Source)

  • Install: sudo apt install tesseract-ocr (Linux) or via Homebrew on macOS.

  • Use with image:

    bash
    CopyEdit
    tesseract scanned_page.jpg output_text
    

  • Supports multiple languages with language packs.

• Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

  • Open the scanned PDF.

  • Use “Recognize Text” under the “Scan & OCR” tool.

  • Export to Word, Text, or searchable PDF.

• Online OCR Tools

  • OnlineOCR.net

  • OCR.space

  • Upload scanned images or PDFs and get plain text.

• Google Drive + Google Docs

  • Upload a scanned PDF or image to Google Drive.

  • Right-click → “Open with” → Google Docs.

  • It runs OCR and opens the document with the extracted text below the image.

2. For Batch Processing (Multiple Pages or Books)

Using Python (for automation)

python
CopyEdit
from PIL import Image
import pytesseract
import os

folder = 'path_to_scanned_images'
for filename in os.listdir(folder):
    if filename.endswith('.jpg') or filename.endswith('.png'):
        path = os.path.join(folder, filename)
        text = pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(path))
        with open('output.txt', 'a', encoding='utf-8') as f:
            f.write(f"n--- {filename} ---n{text}")

• Make sure pytesseract is installed: pip install pytesseract pillow

• You can also use pdf2image to convert PDFs to images before OCR.

3. Improving Accuracy

• Preprocess Images:

  • Convert to grayscale

  • Increase contrast

  • Denoise or deskew

python
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import cv2
image = cv2.imread('page.jpg')
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
_, thresh = cv2.threshold(gray, 150, 255, cv2.THRESH_BINARY)
cv2.imwrite('cleaned_page.jpg', thresh)

• Use cleaned images in OCR for better results.

4. Legal Consideration

Ensure you have the legal right to extract and use the content from the scanned books. Respect copyright laws and usage terms.

Let me know if you need a complete script or solution for a specific file format (e.g., PDF with 300+ pages).