On 11/30/2011 09:55 PM, Eugene Zelenko wrote:

ABBYY has own online OCR service http://finereader.abbyyonline.com

This is very interesting, OCR as a cloud service. I didn't know they were doing this. They charge EUR 7 per 200 pages, or US$ 0.05 per page, which I guess can be (almost) reasonable for the Wikimedia Foundation to pay. I sometimes feel bad because I have OCRed so many tens of thousand pages with a single EUR 129 license of Finereader. Here, EUR 129 would buy us 3700 pages.

All languages of Wikisource together are proofreading slightly less than 900 pages/day, for which OCR would cost EUR 32/day or US$ 43/day. With good OCR, proofreading is more fun, and these numbers may increase. But then again, we wouldn't need the service for all pages, as some books already have OCR.

The most interesting feature of a cloud-based OCR service, is if they can accumulate improvements in font training (?) and dictionaries from a large number of users over time. With Wikisource, they can of course get direct access to the page after proofreading.

So, is the service any good? They even promise to do Fraktur (blackletter). Does it work well?