What I am trying to do is create a book. the pages have a texture with black text and the rest of the texture is transparent. The problem is that blender uses black as transparent 
Is there a way around this? such as maybe using white as alpha instead?
Blender internal or Cycles? In Blender internal I thought you should be able to check ‘negative’ to reverse the effect of the texture, and that might help?
I am using BI. But if I check negative the text becomes white which is not good 
You have to use the same texture on two separate layers : one is set to Color and the other one is set to Alpha, so you can invert the alpha and keep the color natural.