Text Fairy allows you to take photos of your textbook or whatever and turns it into either a PDF or text document. You will have to turn them into text document and then afterwords, copy the text and paste it into LingQ’s import tab (The PDF file did not work for me). I did this with my Japanese books and it worked really well. There are a few edits I have to do but I found that 90%+ of the text was the same as the book.
You can do this with novels, magazines and such. I haven’t tried this method with magazines that include pictures but will play around with it. The text I successfully did this with was 100% Japanese (no pictures).
For folks like me who want to import physical Chinese children’s books (which almost always have the pinyin attached to the top or bottom of each word), I use the Google Translate app on my iPhone/iPad (it works on Android too).
It has OCR built in, so all you have to do is take a picture of the page and highlight the words you want to import (this way you can avoid the pinyin). Then, with Apple’s universal clipboard feature I paste this text into a new LingQ lesson on my Mac.
You can of course import through the LingQ mobile app now but I find this is still more cumbersome than using universal clipboard if you have a Mac.
I might import my Ian Fleming books (in English), I noticed when I first read through them that there were quite a lot of words that I would like to learn and use with ease.
I didn’t however wanted to buy them again in digital form in English as I am reading them in German as part of my studying.
Edit: I agree with Gregf, it sounds got on paper but it probably needs some fine tuning before I give it a try
I’ve tried importing stuff using text scanners my phone (which is made harder by the fact that we can’t import from the LingQ app), but I’ve found the process cumbersome and very slow for anything but a one or two-page text. If I’m going to scan a whole book, or even a several-page magazine article, I’m going to use a proper scanner and my desktop software.
