OCR is an old problem. There is commercial software, such as Finereader, and free software such as Tesseract. But is there also a new trend in home-built software based on new frameworks for neural networks and deep learning? Keras? TensorFlow? Is anybody experimenting with this for OCR of scanned books?
When I ask researchers in image processing / computer vision, they say that plain text (book) OCR "is a solved problem" that nobody researches, and all research goes into self-driving cars reading street signs. Is this true, or are there any exceptions?