reCAPTCHA is a free web-based service that helps digitize books and newspapers. You have probably seen a CAPTCHA before. It is the warped word that you must decipher when completing web registration forms. The CAPTCHAS are used to prevent spam and abuse on the internet. No computer program has the capability to read these words, only humans can. As the world moves from leather bound books and paperbacks to Kindles and Nooks, there is an increasing need to digitize physical books that were written before the computer age. OCR, or "Optical Character Recognition", is a program that photographically scans pages of book and transforms the text into a downloadable format. There is one problem though. OCR is not perfect.
To explain reCAPTCHA's role in the digitization of books, their website explains:
"reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly. But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct."
You can help digitize books by visiting their website at www.recaptcha.net. Also, if you run a website, you can add the reCAPTCHA application to your registration web form to protect your site from spam.
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