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.
-- 21 Quest, Oct 23 2012

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.
-- DIYMatt, Oct 23 2012


I'd use this.
-- AusCan531, Oct 23 2012


Is "actual (gosh, really!?) book" the official 2010's retronym for "book"?
-- phundug, Oct 24 2012


Indeed it seems to be.
-- 21 Quest, Oct 24 2012


To be official, the last 4 characters have to be capitalised.
-- pocmloc, Oct 24 2012


I'll never look for Waldo again!!
-- Voice, Oct 25 2012


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.
-- MechE, Oct 25 2012


Quick enough for text-dense novels like those by Stephen R. Donaldson, or perusing a hardcopy encyclopedia, or college textbooks.
-- 21 Quest, Oct 25 2012


...but give it some Ayn Rand and watch it implode.
-- Alterother, Oct 25 2012



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