IllumiLib: Any book you own. Ask it anything. Verify every answer.

A simple three-step workflow.

IllumiLib is designed to take a physical book from shelf to searchable, quotable, and verifiable without asking you to learn a complicated process.

Your shelf, your scanner

Scan the pages you already own

Use a book scanner or flatbed scanner, or for on-screen content, IllumiLib Capture (part of the desktop app bundle). IllumiLib is built for real libraries, not pristine studio scans. Scan an important book for work, or one of your books for school. It even handles grandma's hand-written recipes.

Result: OCR-ready page images. Nothing else to prep.

Enterprise OCR without the cleanup chore

Get RAG-ready PDF and TXT files

Specify one or more languages or IllumiLib will auto-detect. Got mathematical equations or formulas? We extract those too (rendered as LaTeX notation inside your Markdown output file), along with checkboxes, radio buttons, font-styles, and more. IllumiLib converts your page images into a clean PDF and TXT file, built for retrieval-augmented AI tools and assembled the way you want them.

Result: Minutes later, your book is machine-readable.

Use your favorite AI tool with confidence

Ask questions and verify every answer

Upload an output file to your favorite LLM chat tool and ask away, or go further with IllumiLib Personal Library (part of the desktop app bundle), which shows you the actual scanned page an answer came from, not just a citation, so you can verify it at a glance instead of taking any AI's word for it. Want to listen instead of read? IllumiLib Listen, also in the bundle, turns your text output into an audiobook that sounds human, not robotic.

Result: Faster insight, with verification built in.

“From shelf to searchable in minutes.”

The Honest Comparison

Why not just use my scanner's OCR?

Bundled scanner software and free tools like Tesseract convert an image to text. They handle clean, simple pages and struggle with everything else. Turning your source material into something an AI can be trusted with is a different job.

Video coming soon

	Bundled / Tesseract OCR	IllumiLib (Google Cloud Vision)
Accuracy	Falls off sharply once pages aren't clean	✦~98-99.1% composite on clean printed text, and holds up on the rest
Handwriting	Stock engines are trained on print	✦Recognized with no training or setup
Math	Equations break into stray characters	✦Preserved as LaTeX, Pandoc-ready (Math & LaTeX add-on)
Languages	Packs installed manually, one at a time	✦200+, auto-detected, no setup
Output	Text, hOCR, or a searchable PDF	✦Searchable PDF + TXT, plus verified Markdown with any add-on
Archival format	Plain PDF, no archival standard	✦PDF/A-3u, the ISO standard archives require
Machine-readable data	Whatever you script yourself	✦Word-level data embedded inside the PDF itself
Error handling	Confidence scores exist, but nothing surfaces them	✦Words under 90% flagged for your review before output
Structured data	Layout and font hints only	✦Checkboxes and radio buttons detected (add-on)
1,000-page book	Hours on one machine unless you script it yourself	✦Minutes, processed concurrently in the cloud
Bad scans	Processes anyway, no warning	✦Low-resolution scans flagged at upload, before you pay

Accuracy

Bundled / Tesseract OCR

Falls off sharply once pages aren't clean