Ask HN: What is the best method for turning a scanned book as a PDF into text?

You can scan a book and listen (also copy and paste the text extracted to other apps).

If you are looking to do this on large scale in your own UI, I would recommend either of Google solutions:

1. Google Cloud Vision API (https://cloud.google.com/vision?hl=en)

2. Using Gemini API OCR capabilities.(Start here: https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat)

https://github.com/maurycy/gemini-json-ocr

It can correctly read many other languages than English if that is something you need. Previously I tried others and there were many errors in conversion. This does it well.