Digitizing Surmelian

In 2020, the Armenian Institute republished I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Leon Surmelian; a memoir of a child surviving the horrors of the Armenian Genocide. This is the story of how I got involved in digitizing it and the peculiarities of the process.

I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Leon Surmelian was a bestseller when it was published in 1945, but for some reason it went out of print and was never republished. As it is such a beautiful book, at the Armenian Institute, we recently republished it. In order to do so, I had my first serious experience of digitizing a book via scanning and OCR.

I wrote a short article about that experience of Digitizing Surmelian.

If you would like to buy a copy of the book, there are a few options. Some are better than others, depending on where you live.

• Armenian Institute store
• Amazon Kindle
• Abril Books (Los Angeles)
• National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) (Massachusetts)