Timeline for Is there actually such a thing as "OCR-pirated" books?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 14, 2022 at 20:37 | comment | added | jamesdlin | "I cannot imagine who would sit and scan in all the pages of a book like that only to release it as "warez", without any possibility of making any money from it. That just doesn't happen in reality, I should think." Pirates aren't in it for the money. They're in it for recognition (or other factors). Pirated scans of paper comic books are certainly a thing. You're also assuming that the pirated version was created after a professional digital version was already widely available. | |
| Apr 14, 2022 at 15:11 | comment | added | Ben | If you're willing to dismantle the book, it can be quite straightforward to scan an entire book. There are scanners that can scan a stack of disconnected pages, one at a time, with little manual intervention required. Once all the pages have been scanned, it's easy to run a batch OCR script to extract all the text. | |
| Apr 14, 2022 at 12:55 | comment | added | Bavi_H | I imagine OCR pirating can happen, but using the linked question as evidence of it seems tenuous to me. In the linked question, text went from small caps to lower case. The main comment suggests someone may have copy-pasted text to make their version of the book, and didn't notice the small caps came out as lower case -- i.e. in the orignal, the small caps were a special font that rendered lower case letters with a small caps apperance, but the copy used a normal font throughout. (Another comment suggests OCR may have been used, but its unlikely small caps would OCR as lower case.) | |
| Apr 13, 2022 at 23:54 | comment | added | Vilx- | From personal experience, a LOT of pirated books are badly OCR'd. Especially those from the era before commercial ebooks became popular (aka the 2000's). | |
| Apr 13, 2022 at 21:57 | comment | added | prosfilaes | Pirates are lazy? Quite a few pirates spend a lot of time for something they're not getting paid for. Back in the 8-bit computer days, pirates had to crack various forms of DRM, which required serious intellectual effort. Many book people do work to transcribe public domain work, and some of them work to scan and sometimes OCR older works that aren't in the public domain. Look at archive.org and its magnificent collection of 1980s-1990s computer magazines, virtually technically pirated and scanned by third parties, for example. | |
| Apr 13, 2022 at 21:39 | answer | added | Mark | timeline score: 8 | |
| Apr 13, 2022 at 20:02 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Apr 13, 2022 at 17:09 | comment | added | muru | My first copy of Gone With The Wind was a low-quality paperback from some Indian publisher. It consistently had Ups instead of lips, much to my confusion in the inital chapters ("hot words bubbled to her Ups"). I understood the mistake after seeing it a couple more times, but not how or why it could have happened. Years later I realized that that was something I'd expect to see from OCR going wrong. | |
| Apr 13, 2022 at 16:09 | vote | accept | Bevin | ||
| Apr 13, 2022 at 12:53 | history | edited | Gallifreyan |
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| Apr 13, 2022 at 12:25 | answer | added | Stuart F | timeline score: 14 | |
| S Apr 13, 2022 at 11:59 | review | First questions | |||
| Apr 13, 2022 at 12:51 | |||||
| S Apr 13, 2022 at 11:59 | history | asked | Bevin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |