[wxm]

Some companies buy up the rights to old/out of print books that created this original material. Then they cut it up and automatically digitise it. There was a post on HN quite some time back about somebody describing his process to do exactly this for a repair-your-car book - and how he used it to make money via ads through SEO hits.

[jnbiche]

Do you remember about when this was? I've been searching for the post on HN and can't find anything.

[wxm]

I'm afraid not. I've been searching as well and couldn't find it. I recall his process to be

1. secure the rights to the book (he knew the author personally/through family)

2. cut the book open and run it through a high resolution scanner

3. use imagemagick to preprocess images

4. run OCR on the pages and convert them to markdown

5. have a compiler convert his markdown and images to HTML

EDIT: FOUND THE LINK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055

[jnbiche]

Thanks for tracking that down! Very interesting.