title_body: Is there any software that facilitates scanning of a paper book into an ebook? I have some old sci-fi novels that are out of print and the rights owners are not creating them in ebook form.  Is there any software that facilitates scanning and conversion of these paper books into ebook format?
upvoted_answer: Tesseract is an open source OCR engine that gives fairly good results. It's my understanding that Google use it for Google Books. OCRFeeder is a project for document layout analysis that works as a nice GUI for Tesseract.
  
  Ocropus is another known open source OCR system.