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Using your smartphone's camera and a simple OCR (optical
character recognition) program, it shouldn't be prohibitively difficult
to produce an app that allows you to point your smartphone at a
physical paper page in an actual (gosh, really!?) BOOK (or
magazine, newspaper, etc) and perform a Find-on-Page
action.
You
know, for folks who still enjoy the feel of an actual paper book.
Rather like using GPS simply to find your location on a paper map.
That is all.
[link]
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With Google Goggles you can point your camera phone at a page of text and translate it into english. It shouldn't be too hard to search the text. |
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Is "actual (gosh, really!?) book" the official 2010's retronym for "book"? |
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To be official, the last 4 characters have to be capitalised. |
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I'll never look for Waldo again!! |
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Unless you're looking at something like the OED, the actual amount of text on a given page is fairly low. A PDF or e-book search checks the whole text, this checks a page (or two at most) at a time. This means finding a given word or phrase in a work is still not going to be quick. |
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Quick enough for text-dense novels like those by Stephen R.
Donaldson, or perusing a hardcopy encyclopedia, or college
textbooks. |
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...but give it some Ayn Rand and watch it implode. |
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