Quote:
Originally Posted by recycledelectron
It seems to me that one feature missing from most ebook readers is the ability to snap a pic of a page (think of a cell phone camera) and then OCR the image into a usable ebook file.
Let's say I am the note taker at a meeting, and need to pass around a copy of a proposal someone brought in on paper. I could snap a pic, OCR it, proof read it, and send it to every other ebook reader by email, bluetooth, wifi, or usb.
I think the iPhone / iPad can do something similar to this. Can any other devices do this?
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Not that I'm aware of, but why would you want them to? The use case you give would be an at best infrequent occurrence.
Doing it would require a built in camera, which would add to device cost and not be wanted/needed by a lot of users, plus built-in OCR software and sufficient processing power to run it effectively, which some devices probably wouldn't have.
On the rare occasions I've needed to do something like what you suggest, I've scanned a hardcopy to my desktop, run OCR on it, converted to the desired format, and emailed those interested with a copy of the conversion after the fact. There was no reason to need to do so at the time the hardcopy was distributed. It could happily wait till a later convenient moment.
With any device, there is an implicit notion of what it will be used for, with the corresponding idea that uses beyond that are something else's job, and if you need to do one of them, you use something else. This is a "something else's job" case.
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Dennis