it sure beats having to buy it, but seriously come on...

Mango , 5 months ago

OCR?

Gaspar , 5 months ago

Optical Character Recognition. Essentially, software that “reads” an image and pulls text out of it.

antonim , 5 months ago

By the time you finished making this snarky meme, you could’ve set up a program to OCR a book yourself.

5714 , 5 months ago

‘A’ yes, but the more scan pix you get, the annoyter you get

Kingofthezyx , 5 months ago

Bitch you can’t ctrl-F or click to chapter in an actual book either.

JackbyDev , 5 months ago

Wait until OP hears about the Index at the back of the book.

empireOfLove2 OP , 5 months ago

I know, that’s my point! PDF’s are inherently superior BECAUSE you can usually CTRL-F them.

lanolinoil , 5 months ago

projectnaptha.com

nameisnotimportant , 5 months ago

Very impressive! That’s a bummer that you need Chrome to make it happen though :/

lanolinoil , 5 months ago

It will still work on PDFs loaded in Chrome to be fair though.

DontNoodles , 5 months ago

Sites like Anna’s library should permit users to flag books without OCR and permit users to submit OCR version of the books.

unperson , 5 months ago

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

library.bz/main/upload/ anonymous username genesis password upload

combat_brandonism , 5 months ago

downbear

RobotToaster , 5 months ago

Is this some kind of kink symbol?

silent_water , 5 months ago

no, we don’t have downvotes on hexbear and this is what they looked like when we did. it means bad post.

spacecowboy , 5 months ago

It’s a super easy way to add more people to your block list.

Moonrise2473 , 5 months ago

I much prefer doing ocr by myself if really needed, than getting an half assed “book” full of typos and broken tables just because someone did an automated OCR but didn’t have the 5-6 hours required to manually edit to make it decent

Already be thankful that someone took the time to flip page by page in their scanner manually and upload it somewhere

flipflop97 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

You can do it yourself:

ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io

jlow , 5 months ago

There are so many:

stirlingtools.comdocs.paperless-ngx.comwww.openpaper.work/en/

OgdenTO , 5 months ago

Use the index

raven , 5 months ago

I hope this sentiment never stops someone from uploading a textbook without OCR. Once it’s scanned it can always be OCRed at a later time.

Anamnesis , 5 months ago

Simple: pirate adobe acrobat and ocr them yourself.

empireOfLove2 OP , 5 months ago

I might just do that and reupload the OCR’d copy. I already have 3 or 4 books that I’ve saved out to cut the binding off of and scan in- gonna need OCR for that too.

In my free time, of course. University waits for no student…

Lemongrab , 5 months ago

Or OCRMyPDF github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

Creddit , 5 months ago

There are a bunch of online tools that are free and let you upload a PDF to have it go through OCR.

Just Google “Free PDF OCR” and click through all the ads to upload, then give them a temporary email address to get a download link to the finished product.

Hot tip: There are free temporary email address sites too, if you need one to avoid getting on their ad lists.

imkali , 5 months ago

List of free temorary email solutions.

www.guerrillamail.com

10minutemail.com

addy.io - this one is slightly different

and about a billion similar ones.

Agent641 , 5 months ago

If you have a jpg or png file, you can upload it to Google drive, then right click and open in Google docs, and it will OCR the text for you.

RegalPotoo , 5 months ago

Look, it’s all about authorial intent - if the author had wanted their book to be easy to reference or accessible to people who use screen readers, they would have published a DRM free PDF in the first place. Gotta respect the artist’s vision.

trucy , 5 months ago

…and sometimes the artist turns out to be an idiot :D

nilloc , 5 months ago

Or the professor who’s profiting off requiring the latest edition of their own book each year.

Gork , 5 months ago

OCR’ing a book before uploading saves so much hours on the user end of things. I wish it were done more so I don’t have to leave my computer running overnight to batch OCR stuff.