We’ll confess that we have a fondness for real books and plenty of them. So does [James], and he decided he needed a way to take a picture of his bookshelves and make each book clickable to find more information. This is one of those things that sounds fairly simple until you decide to do it. You can try an example of the results and then go back and read about the journey it took to get there.
There are several subtasks involved. First, you want to identify each book’s envelope. It wouldn’t do to click on the Joy of Cooking and get information about Remembrance of Things Past.
The next challenge is reading the title of the book. This can be tricky. Fonts differ. The book could be upside down. Some titles go cross the spine, but most go vertically. The remainder of the task is fairly easy. If you know the region and the title, you can easily find a link (for Google Books, in this case) and build an SVG overlay that maps the areas for each book to the right link.
The optical character recognition is done with GPT-4. The prompt used is straightforward:
Read the text on the book spine. Only say the book cover title and author if you can find them. Say the book that is most promiment. Return the format [title] [author], with no punctuation.
With that information, a Google API will look up the book for you, and the rest is straightforward. You can grab the code on Git ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
