[Athen] Google books :Kurzweil question

[Ken Petri]

This depends on the book. Most public domain Google books have a link for
"plain text." Though you lose the pagination, you can get the entire text
content and it is typically of pretty decent quality (the same OCR results
that Google itself uses to perform selection and search capabilities). Also,
you can download those books as epub, which is a full text format and can be
read in iBooks or other accessible e-reader. Again, epub will lack the
pagination. You can also get those books as PDF. The PDF maintains the
pagination of the original but these are image-based PDF and have no text
content. As Kenneth notes, doing an OCR yourself will typically not give
usable results, as the page images, though generally high quality, are not
as good as you would get from a high-res scanner optimized for OCR.


Best regards,
ken
---
  Ken Petri
  Program Director, OSU Web Accessibility Center
  102D Pomerene Hall, 1760 Neil Avenue
  Columbus, Ohio  43210
  Office: 614.292.1760
  Mobile: 614.218.1499
  Fax: 614.292.4190
  Email: petri.1 at osu.edu


On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Kenneth Elkind <Kenneth.Elkind at umb.edu>wrote:


> I assisted the digital library department on the accessibility of their

> databases. We found that Google books is most inaccessible database. We

> tried Jaws, Read &Write gold and Kurzweil 1000 with no success. We was able

> to use  Read&Write Golds screenshot reader feature allowing you to OCR a

> section of the screen, it is  quite arduous and impractical if you need to

> read a lot of the content.

>

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