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I did experiment with using this to bring out the text in photos of books. Here's an example:

I tried to use vanilla Tesseract on it, but I had no luck getting anything usable out of it.

You have to compensate for the 3D deformation present in the captured image. There has been some impressive work in this area recently.

Some commercial OCR engines such as Nuance Capture SDK have built in functionality for this.