Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
But I think the OP article underestimates the work involved in proofreading a scanned book.
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Nope.
With modern professional-grade scanners and software it is relatively fast and easy.
I've done technical papers at work and narrative fiction and non-fiction for personal use. A 400 page book can be scanned in under an hour, ocr'ed in 30 minutes, and proofed in 3-4 hours and no special skill is required; it's the kind of work you can give to a summer intern.
With the proper tools and workflow the proofing is reduced primarily to looking for broken sentences as the ocr software is effectively perfect when fed 400-dpi grayscale images. For non-fiction, the biggest effort is tagging the footnote/endnote hyperlinks.
In our case, the proper tools were an Epson GT-series scanner (good for up to 100 pages a minute through the sheet feeder or 8 pages a minute in manual mode), Omnipage OCR (Abbey was a bit better for the technical papers, but Omnipage produced better MS Word docs), and Presto Pagemanager Pro. Total cost is about $2000 but as a one-time expense it is easily justified in a corporate environment.
Old Technical papers are a lot more complex because of the charts and tables often need manual cleaning to bring up to modern standards but our in-house graphics specialist could process one in a couple of hours when we were converting our archives to all digital ten years ago. It helped that our management was technically literate and believed in investing in productivity tools.
It's not rocket science or brain surgery.