What a shame that people have to use homebrew methods to duplicate the effort that someone (Google) has already done with vastly greater resources.
Google Books, a.k.a., Google Book Search, has already scanned and OCR'ed about 20% of all books in existence -- i.e., 25 million of an estimated 130 million books. So, "somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them."[1]
I understand the legal issues, authors not getting compensated, etc., but it's still a shame that it actually exists but it's inaccessible (except for snippets).
Well, at least Google has all the books indexed, even if we can't see them, so that you know what to go to your local library and look for even though you can't see it there on the internet.
Google Books, a.k.a., Google Book Search, has already scanned and OCR'ed about 20% of all books in existence -- i.e., 25 million of an estimated 130 million books. So, "somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them."[1]
I understand the legal issues, authors not getting compensated, etc., but it's still a shame that it actually exists but it's inaccessible (except for snippets).
[1] https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-goo...