Last December Google announced it wants to make offline information searchable online. They want to do this by scanning books and other documents from libraries. It made me wonder how you can scan that many pages. Is this a process that is done by hand (turning the pages)?

So I searched for document scanning and found Digital Documents LLC that does document scanning services. One of the things mentioned in this website is character recognition. Not only do you want to scan a page with text, but you want to actually recognize the letters so you can reproduce it. For Google this is very important.

Google wants to make the offline information searchable and therefore has to litterally read and index all the texts in the books. Without character recognition this is not possible. They’re up for a big task, but I am sure they will be successful. They already have most of the leading libraries on board.