I have encountered a few interesting items relating to online, full-text books during the past few days, and thought they would make a good snapshot of where things stand at this time:

• Google Book Search : the Good, the Bad & the Ugly is an article in the current issue of Campus Technology which gives a great, non-technical overview of what the project is doing, and where it might be going. (found via LISNews )
• Google Book Search: Document Understanding on a Massive Scale (Pdf) is the text of Luc Vincent’s keynote at the ICDAR 2007 conference. Don’t read it simply because he heads Googles Optical Character Recognition (OCR) team – read it because it is fascinating and informative! (posted to NGC4lib by Owen Stephens)
• Finally, there is The Top Inventions of 2008 by Michael Hart (inventor of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg). This isn’t your standard, run-of-the-mill predictions article. This looks at technology that is just around the corner (USB 3.0, Flash memory capacity, and the number of OCR scanned books) and realizes that we will soon be able to carry around more full-text books on a USB flash drive than exist in most libraries. Think about how that possibility will change our profession. (found via Open Access News )

You have heard about the book digitization projects.  You know that Optical Character Recognition is sometimes an uncertain thing, especially with offbeat typesets and obscure fonts.

Then there is CAPTCHA (and here), the security method that many sites are using to monitor logins.  Basically you view an image of distorted text, and type in the correct letters in order to access the site.

What if each of these problems could use the other as a solution?  reCAPTCHA (here, too)

found on MetaFilter