py-BookBundler

A python Flask webapp to enable publishers to bundle ebooks with paper books, providing that they can upload a picture of a page. The uploaded picture is ocr-ed with tesseract-ocr and if it matches the target page inserted by the operator a download page is shown. The algorithm in matching.py tries to guess if source and destination are similar enough, since a byte-perfect match is pure utopia.

API

The app exposes a RESTful API.

• GET /: returns a list of available publications.
• GET /book/<isbn>: presents the user with a form to upload a picture of the target page.
• POST /book/<isbn>: invoked by a form, takes the picture and spawns the ocr.
• GET /new:[basic-auth] presents the operator with a form to load data about a new publication.
• POST /new/<isbn> [basic-auth] creates the new publication.

Requirements

• A working installation of tesseract-ocr;
• tesseract-ocr Italian language files (or change the app.py:91 and app.py:181 language setting with -l eng).
• A mongodb instance running on the same server as py-BookBundler
• See requirements.txt for python dependencies.

License

The py-BookBundler project is © 2013 by Gabriele Alese (gabriele@alese.it) / http://www.alese.it Released under a MIT license (see LICENSE.txt for details). tesseract-ocr (not included) is available under Apache License 2.0 (see http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).

Usage

Unsurprisingly,

$ python server.py

will execute the flask app behind a basic http server on port 80 (requires root privileges; otherwise, change server.py:7). The test server is in NO WAY meant to be put in production, and you should wrap app.py in a real wsgi wrapper like gunicorn, gevent or tornado. YMMV.