it sure beats having to buy it, but seriously come on...
not being able to ctrl-F a textbook or have click-to-chapter links sure makes studying harder these days... and any scanning software worth it's salt will at least do the bare minimum OCR automatically...
I much prefer doing ocr by myself if really needed, than getting an half assed "book" full of typos and broken tables just because someone did an automated OCR but didn't have the 5-6 hours required to manually edit to make it decent
Already be thankful that someone took the time to flip page by page in their scanner manually and upload it somewhere
Look, it's all about authorial intent - if the author had wanted their book to be easy to reference or accessible to people who use screen readers, they would have published a DRM free PDF in the first place. Gotta respect the artist's vision.
I might just do that and reupload the OCR'd copy. I already have 3 or 4 books that I've saved out to cut the binding off of and scan in- gonna need OCR for that too.
In my free time, of course. University waits for no student...
OCR'ing a book before uploading saves so much hours on the user end of things. I wish it were done more so I don't have to leave my computer running overnight to batch OCR stuff.
There are a bunch of online tools that are free and let you upload a PDF to have it go through OCR.
Just Google "Free PDF OCR" and click through all the ads to upload, then give them a temporary email address to get a download link to the finished product.
Hot tip: There are free temporary email address sites too, if you need one to avoid getting on their ad lists.