OCRopus

OCRopus(tm) is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities.


http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/

The Book Ripper Project

Bkrpr is a set of free software and hardware that helps you digitize books. Some of our hardware designs make it easy to photograph all the pages in a book without harming the book. Other designs allow you to remove the binding so the pages can be dropped into a sheet-fed scanner. Whichever method you use, the resulting images can be processed with our software to make user-friendly files in a variety of formats.

http://bkrpr.org