I come across books written in the 17th century that are scanned and uploaded to Google Books. The formatting is pretty bad and sometimes the letters are different and hard to read.

Is there an AI program that can scan an entire book and reproduce it in modern type font?

The term for this is OCR. There are lots of OCR software that can do this in a variety of formats. So is the book scanned in to one big PDF? I think the trick might be finding which software is most accurate for the font and scan quality you want to convert. Good ones will have trial downloads.

The other necessity is a good scanner. I've tried scanning books with my phone and using Acrobat to do the OCR. The scans were mediocre, at best (due to the curvature of the book pages), resulting in poor OCR.

I do not have the physical book. It's scanned into Google Books. I have downloaded the pdf from there.

A normal OCR results in all sorts of odd characters and bad page breaks. That's why I thought some sort of AI would be better to weed through the mess.

I'm sure there are companies out there with AI OCR products,... I have no idea if any of them are good or there are any that are trained on an old English script. Most products are going to be focused on modern fonts.

That's a good point. I have no answer to your question but also OCR a lot, but with poor results as you describe, so would be very interested in what you find out. Keep us posted.

There is some effort to have volunteers proofread the scanned documents to correct errors.

The problem is in finding the volunteers.

do you have a link to the pdf? I have scripts that do ocr and basic top-down / left to right formatting. The ocr should come out better than ms word and stuff; it's just a matter of how crazy the formatting gets (although I'm assuming pretty basic for a book).

Although there are many programs available today that can handle this task, so far I've found only one option that truly satisfied me. In an article https://euroweeklynews.com/2024/02/21/a-deep-dive-into-pdf-guru-and-its-impact-on-digital-documents/ about working with digital documents, there was an excellent editor featuring a summarization function for large files. I'm currently testing it, and I can say it performs perfectly in all the functions it promises.

It is probably far less expensive and very much less trouble to just buy a copy of the book.

If you have a PDF of the book, you can try loading it into Google NotebookLM.