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How much better would commercial OCR software be compared to the stuff that’s available online for free?
More specifically: Reading text in pictures (things like book covers etc…)
I work with OCR quite a lot and can definitely vouch that the commercial offerings are much better than what you can find out there for free. Yes, you can make a free one ‘work’, but it will take a lot of effort for sub-optimal results.
I recommend finding a product that uses the ABBYY FineReader : It does a great job with little configuration.
You may want to consider whether you need to use an SDK provided by the OCR supplier or an end-user application. The SDK will provide position details, etc of what it finds and offer a lot more in-depth control, but will be more expensive. The end-user package will basically just read everything it finds, but you may be able to set it to automatic or control it rudimentally and it might be good enough for what you’re trying to do, and may be a lot cheaper.
Get a trial version and give it a go!