GImageReader

You can add multiple images and process them into one text.
So, ideal for converting a complete book!
Very rare in free OCR software under Windows.

And you can edit the text in this program too, if you like, or copy the text into your favourite texteditor.
It took me a while to find this gem of a program.

A very simple front-end for multilingual text recognition. Allows selecting sections of pages to be translated and multipage translation - these were the features I needed and used just after installing.

I did tests with English and it didn't work well. In Brazilian Portuguese where we use accents it got even worse.

VERY quick and easy to use!! Utilizes the very famous Tesseract :)

uses Tesseract library (in fact found this gem from Tesseract download page). Tesseract in the form of having GUI and trained Language files. it automatically brings them together for you.

simple to use. has all the tools you need to scan from a book. helped me a lot.

you can turn pictures without editing them (although in the case of a book you can select files, right click - turn clockwise in windows). you can make image adjustments (only if you need, i didn't). you can select area to read (helps when you have pages side by side, but you need them sequential). converted text is added to the right panel in txt (simple text) form.

you just scan and put all the files in the program. has different language libraries.