Android/iPhone Image parsing

I wanted to write an Android and/or an i开发者_开发知识库Phone app that entails taking a picture of something (right now, I just want to limit to text) after which the app parses the text to make use of it. For example, perhaps taking picture of a sentence (or may be just fragments) will be then parsed by the app to bring up more information about the book. Title, author, ISBN etc. And even may be information about other books that are similar in content to this book.

Is this possible to do something like this? Is there an API that exists already that parses the content of an image? How is an image stored in Android and iPhone? Is it possible to implement the app in one platform and not the other?

I'd appreciate any input or advice that you guys have to offer. Thank you!

You're looking for this, possibly.

It's called OCR, or Optical Character Recognition.

Also check out ZXing a great library for decoding one- and two-dimensional barcodes. There are both iPhone and Android versions.