Scanning Books OpticBook 3600 Scanner

[jnuttall]

If you are like me, you like to scan some books and then change them into audio books using TextAloud. I usually get a lot of my books from the library which is cost-effective. The typical scanner makes it difficult to scan books, since you have to press down hard on the spine of the book to get a crisp scan. I just bought a new scanner designed for scanning books. It is called the OpticBook 3600 from Plustek ($250). www.plustek.com

What is unique about this scanner is that the glass comes to the edge of the scanner. This allows you to set the spine of the book on the edge of the scanner to get a clear scan. It also scans quickly into USB 2.0. I generally find that most pages scan in about five seconds. I then use OCR (FineReader Pro) software to create my text. Then I take the text and create an audio book using TextAloud. If you're interested in scanning a lot of books you might look at this scanner. I'm enjoying my new scanner; it's worth the price of the scanner.

Jim Nuttall -- Michigan

[SFCurley]

That's great input, Jim. When I get to my stack of books, that may be my answer. Thanks.

[QA NYC]

I have seen HP market a glass sheet like scanner that one can just place over a page or object to scan into the computer. This may be a solution to book lovers converting to audio.

However, I am looking for a less laborous method of input. Has anyone found one yet?

Braking the book spine is not working out as the pages needs to be placed on the scanner one page at a time - time which I don't have nor can afford.

Thanks for any input.

Peter

[Bunger Henry]

You should try the Microtek ScanMaker 5950 and use ABBYY Finereader 7.0.

The scanner has an automatic feeder, so you cut the spine off the book, and feed in a whole stack of sheets at once. The software will get it in the right order for you if you tell it odd or even sheets and counting backwards or forwards.

[tomhogers]

Hi Guys,

The best way (and one of the fastest) to scan books without damaging them is with a hand-held or portable scanner.

Take a look at the DocuPen scanner here:

http://www.docupen.com/support/#gq5

This scans at about 4 seconds per page, is battery driven, stores up to 100 pages in its memory and connects to your computer by USB2 for fast download.

Have a look at the ZDNet or Epinions reviews of Handheld Scanners at:

http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/Scanners/4 ... _16-0.html

http://www.epinions.com/cmhd-Scanners-A ... ld_Scanner


Cheers,

Tom

[jerblaster23]

I see this is old but I was wondering what people thought about those new digital projectors they have at school in some of the classrooms. It seems like it could be used easily to scan a book taking screanshots you could simply flip the pages quickley and scan a book in no time. I scan a lot of books and it's a lot of work, the OpticBook 3600 is a good idea but I don't seem to have problems with the book spine and getting a good scan it's more with having to scan every page turnning the book over waiting for the page to scan ect, with one of these digital projectors it has some kind of camera so you don't have to wait for every page to scan, you could simply take a screanshot and keep on flipping through the pages quickley and scan a book very quickley. what do you guys think of this idea? and also how expensive would these machines cost?

[Kwok Fai]

I found out that using Digital Carmera to take a "picture" and put the jpg file into FineReader 7.0 professional can do the job. I used a 4megal pixels carmera. If I took two pages at the same time, the program would complaint about the resolution (but it still did well). When I only took one page at a time, it worked perfectly (just like using scanner. I think if you have 8 mega pixels DC, you can take two pages at the same time). But you need to make sure that page is "flat". If the page is bend and your DC distorts the page a little bit more, the program may fail to recoginze the text.

I have a question, in fact. The FineReader 7.0 professional is demo verion only. I am still trying to find a "perfect" OCR program. However, it seems that it is quit difficult to get one for other brand. e.g. Omnipage pro 14 (some reveiw says it beats FineReader) or PaperPort 10 (is this one good??) . Any advice from others? Or where can I find the trail version.

In addition, I find that in the past, Nextup did find special offer from Omnipage pro 12.0. Will there be similar special offer for Omnipage Pro 14.0 and FineReader 7.0 pro.???

[kdwhite]

Not sure on new OCR offers, but we are talking with a few companies.

[jnuttallphd]

Hello -- I see there still some interest in this thread. For those who scan a lot of books it might be worth your while to look into the Canon DR-2080C high-speed scanner. You have to take the spine of the book off. Kinko's will do this for a dollar or two, it's worth having them do it. This high-speed scanner can do 40 pages a minute duplex mode. You can then take the images into FineReader Pro 7.0 for your OCR. I've read a lot of reviews on high-speed scanner's this one appears to be the best foreign entry-level cost 700 dollars @ Amazon.com. I've used a different Canon high-speed scanner at work. They do say a lot of time.

By the way I still enjoy my Plustek Optibook 3600 scanner. I can do a 400 page book in a little than an hour. I generally scan library books. So I have don't have the cost of buying a book

Jim -- Michigan[/b]

[Roundtree]

Thanks for supplying the information concerning the Plustek OpticBook Scanner. I have been checking the web for information concerning it and it looks like a reasonably priced solution for scanning books.

Has anyone else purchased this scanner or know of a similar one that you would recommend from your experiences?

Thank you.

[jnuttallphd]

I still find the Plustek very reliable for scanning books. I do some scanning of other items like sheets of music and it works well. But I would only consider this scanner if you're really into scanning books. Since the book can lay easily on the scanner with the spine of the book on the edge of the scanner, it makes scanning books a breeze. In order to get this scanner I had to contact the company directly and order it from their US division.

Jim Nuttall

[Roundtree]

I have not yet made a decision concerning the purchase of of this scanner since I already have two. My heart is my Epson 1640 SU Photo scanner which provides excellent results but has the usual problems involved with scanning books. If you would, please, tell me step for step what you are doing. My purpose is to make my own eBooks.
Do you agree with the accessment of the Plustek scanner given on this website http://www.justechn.com/reviews/article ... k_3600.php



I think FineReader OCR software is delivered with the Plustek but I already have OmniPage 15 Pro and would like to stay with that.

[EdwardA]

Is anyone using the OpticBook 3600 flat bed for scanning books? It seems to be quite reasonably priced and some web users seem pleased. Can you set it to auto scan with say a 2 second pause so that you can turn the book over and scan the other half, OR turn the page and scan? Any drawbacks you have experienced? Thanks ...

[EdwardA]

Can you set it {OpticBook 3600} to auto scan with say a 2 second pause so that you can turn the book over and scan the other half, OR turn the page and scan?

While I probably will give this scanner a try for my college attending son, but I am not impressed with the manufacturer. I called them to ask ?s and was passed to 5 different people before I got an answer. None of them spoke English very well. My ? was about the relationship in the scanning process between the supplied Book Pilot software and the supplied version of ABBYY FineReader, and whether one could easily use Book Pilot with OmniPage instead.

While I am quite unfamiliar with OCR and scanning, I would descrive BookPilot as a front end user interface (perhaps similar to (Canon MP Navigator that Canon supplies with its low end scanners e.g. MP150/MP170). BookPilot serves a very important function with OpticBook scanner in that it automatically rotates every other scan since you need to rotate the book 180 degrees as you are scanning one page at a time to utilize their unique feature of getting close to the spine of the page and only loosing an insignificant part of the margin. The answer from Alestron (the OB mfg.) is that yes you can use BookPilot with OmniPage. I hope that this is true or that someone here has direct experience with this as I was able to purchase OmniPage 15 Pro for a mere $115.

As regards my ? in prior post - no you can not set the OB to autoscan with a certain amount of delay so you can turn the pages. You have to push a button on the scanner each time. It seems that scanning alot is tedious and an autoscan capability would speed things up and reduce mouse clicks or button pushes.

Will report back here if I start using the OpticBook as there seems to be significant forum interest in book scanning where you do not need to cut the spine. By the way price is still less than $250 as the original poster indicated a couple of years ago.

[feddup]

I was interested in this scanner from this thread. This bookpilot software has me confused. Both omnipage and finereader have the ability to rotate the pages to the correct orientation automatically. OCR software isn't perfect but, in my experience, the automatically rotate feature works 99.99% of the time. I'm pretty sure the scanner will work with both OCRs. I've only owned two Canons neither of which were on the "approved" list from Nuance or AABBy and they worked fine.. By the way $115 for omnipage pro is a good deal. Get it. I paid $77 for the standard version and I'm pretty happy. Omnipage doesn't seem to have custom scan sizes available which finereader does but that's nitpicking. I wish people who bought this scanner would comment on it's capabilities as far as fine print, shaded graphics or any other book scanning specific issues.

[EdwardA]

I was interested in this scanner from this thread. This bookpilot software has me confused. Both omnipage and finereader have the ability to rotate the pages to the correct orientation automatically. OCR software isn't perfect but, in my experience, the automatically rotate feature works 99.99% of the time. I'm pretty sure the scanner will work with both OCRs. I've only owned two Canons neither of which were on the "approved" list from Nuance or AABBy and they worked fine.. By the way $115 for omnipage pro is a good deal. Get it. I paid $77 for the standard version and I'm pretty happy. Omnipage doesn't seem to have custom scan sizes available which finereader does but that's nitpicking. I wish people who bought this scanner would comment on it's capabilities as far as fine print, shaded graphics or any other book scanning specific issues.

Feddup and others if you are considering the Opticbook 3600 you might try to postpone any purchase for a short while until I can provide more information as I now have the unit. Briefly it is a good tool (perhaps the best tool) if you are scanning books where the text on facing pages comes close to the spine AND it is not a paperback or other kind of binding that you are able to push down hard enough on so that the text can be scanned two-pages at a time on any other flatbed scanner. The scanner also has good functionality if you use the bundled software AND if you are using ABBYY as your OCR software. HOWEVER even though the sales dept. all but guaranteed me that the scanner would work easily with OmniPage 15 Pro so far that is definitely not the case. After the 2nd page of a multi page scan Opticbook seemingly forces OmniPage to attempt to recalibrate the scanner for each of these subsequent pages and hence they take 3 to 4 times the normal time ( 30 seconds instead of 6 or 7 seconds).

Opticbook customer and technical support is poor to very poor. Pre-sale information was inaccurate as confirmed by the person in tech support who said that Opticbook seems to be very buggy with OmniPage but seems to be fine with OmniPage vesions 8 to 10. The bundled software includes ABBYY 5.0 sprint OCR and so I expect that it will work flawless with ABBYY 8 Pro - I just downloaded demo of 8 Pro and at least so far it seems fine.

I plan to give a fuller report on the Opticbook with more experience. I probably am "forced" to keep it as the best alternative for my son scanning textbooks with print close to the spine and where we do not want to reduce the value of the book by cutting the binding and using a scanner with ADF. Fortunately the Opticbook is not too expensive ($235) but neither is a grat value. For at least some book scanning situations it is the best choce and if you fit into that category alot then it would be a time saver and pay for itself eventually. For routine scanning I'd choose something else - the $90 Canon scanner/printer that I also am auditioning did a better job with books that it can scan (paperback pushed down firmly) than did the Opticbook on the same book AND both using OmniPage 15 Pro. I did not do a lot of comparing these two scanners head to head like this, but it has given me the impression that I'd only use the Opticbook when I had no other book scanning choice.

Hope this helps those who are considering this scanner.

[EdwardA]

The scanner also has good functionality if you use the bundled software AND if you are using ABBYY as your OCR software. HOWEVER even though the sales dept. all but guaranteed me that the scanner would work easily with OmniPage 15 Pro so far that is definitely not the case. After the 2nd page of a multi page scan Opticbook seemingly forces OmniPage to attempt to recalibrate the scanner for each of these subsequent pages and hence they take 3 to 4 times the normal time ( 30 seconds instead of 6 or 7 seconds).

This problem is resolved and while I have not fully tested OmniPage 15 Pro with OpticBook 3600 scanner it seems to work just fine if you use the WIA driver supplied by OpticBook NOT the twain driver. The latter is problematic.

Unfortunately I have now wasted my one free tech support call to OmniPage and more time playing on my own. In addition the OpticBook tech support person did not even consider suggesting that I try using a different OpticBook driver and it is their company that told me things were compatible. Just wanted to give an update ASAP so I am providing accurate information to other forum users.

Wish it were possible to edit your own posts after posting as I'd modify my earlier post as if read by itself it leaves a distorted view of Opticbook scanner.

[feddup]

Thanks for the feedback. Scanning close to the spine is definitely an issue with hardbacks. Finereader and omnipage both seem best with their own driver. I have a Canon 8400f and was pondering the optibook. The price is pretty high and information is sketchy so thanks for the experiences. I'll wait for now. You ought to post a month down the road and see how omnipage and the optibbok scanner are working once your techniques get refined. OCR takes time to learn it's quirks.

[EdwardA]

While I have done photo scanning for Photoshop, I am new to OCR and scanning text and realize that my technique is far from prefected. Nonetheless, I have a methodical approach to things as many decades ago I spent my freshman year in engineering school.

I am evaluating the Opticbook scanner and simultaneously evaluating the tril versions of have of OmniPage 15 Pro and ABBYY FineReader 8 Pro. ANy sugestions on my evaluation procedures are welcome.

Tentative conclusion/hypothesis: OpticBook scanner is of limited value. Its primary advantage is that one does the least amount of damage to the binding of a book. When a page is challenging to scan, both OCRs do a poor job in different ways. ABBYY definitely had fewer false negatives on the problematic pages, perhaps a slight advantage. In virtually all cases that I tested, the quality of scan and the number of suspect words/characters was nearly identical whether the OpticBook was scanning facing pages OR if it was using its one unique feature. Namely, since its glass comes close to the edge one can scan one page at a time with the other half of the book hanging down in front of the scanner. The only advantage of scanning this way is less potential damage to book binding, but it adds to the scanning time enormously.

Details: Almost all scans were done in B&W mode at 300dpi with straighten lines; despeckle; look facing pages and separate as options. Brightness was set at 50%. I experimented with other settings including grayscale (wehre I could vary contrast) and a few scans at 600dpi. The problematic book is a paperback 4.5"w x 7.5"h with slightly more than a 0.25" margin toward the spine. I expect that the point size is 9 or slightly smaller. The paper is 10 yeras old but is not yellowed. Contrast is slightly below "average". I tried to pick pages that had alot of the following toward the spine . , " - Some pages also had em dashes which ABBYY does not like as pointed out in other threads. The most problematic page was page 170 of a 507 page book. I also scanned afew even pages toward front of book and closer to the middle so that different spine and page curvatures would be part of this part of my testing. Other books were tested as well but generally these were quite satisfactory scans and OCR results regardless of orientation on scanner and regardless of Omni or ABBYY.

So the more problematic pages had 10 to 17 suspect words/characters on the page. For this and all of my testing there was only text with no tables or graphics or formula or equations. There was an occasionaly number in addition to page numbers. Everything was in English. The preponderacne of these were toward the spine as I would expect. EIther scanning as facing pages or as a single page gave similar though not identical results - bascially very unsatisfactory. In addition to the large number of suspects, each OCR confidently passed on the single character o as being suspect and this occurred at the end of at least two lines. In addition the single letter f was recognized accurately but not flagged as being suspect. Entire short words of an in am were not part of the scan at all and were not flagged as being a potential problem. I redid this page several times to make sure that I was not misaligning the book or not pressing down on the spine sufficiently.

The amount of time to clean up this page would have been enormous and I'm sure that if I were scanning a substantial amount of this book I would have realize 10 or 15 pages into it that I would need to adopt a different strategy (600 dpi; grayscale and finding a brightness/contrast that worked; cut the spine and have flat pages). Since I am evaluating things for my dyslexic college aged son, having that many errors as well as words entirely missing would be a nightmare for him to correct. If his reading and proofing were upto that he would not need a text-to-speech solution for most of his reading.

In some but not all of the scans on the most problematic pages ABBYY had fewer false negatives - that is great, at least it new enough to alert the user that something might be wrong. But in this case there were so many flags that one would most likely say they needed to rescan.

I was rather amazeed with some of the OCRs stupidity. Namely the suggested corections were often not words that are in any English dictionary that I know. It is also clear that the OCRs do not seem to use the facts of the most commonly used words in typicaly non-professional writing in combination with what it has recognized with a higher level of certainty.

Personally from my brief experience, I understand the statements of power users that each OCR has its pros and cons. Learning to use the tool skillfully is always going to be required; a skilled cook can do wonders with almost any brand of sharp knife. For my son with dyslexia Omni Pro has a significant advantage because of its built in proof reading voice, which is quite helpful.

I expect that I will keep the OpticBook but think that using it unique feature of scanning books one page at a time will be used infrequently. When results are good doing it that way or as facing page are equally good and facing pages cuts the scanning time down. For very large textbooks that might not fit two facing pages on a flatbed the OpticBook would be useful. For more normal sized paper or hardbacks I don't see the OpticBook so far as having any advantage over any other flatbed scanner.

I expect that my opinion of the OCRs will improve with my greater skill/experience and I expect learning about their training/learning modes. If all pages were scanned well as was the case with 4 of the 5 books that I tried then I'd be delighted. But it is the one challenging book that was assigned for a class at the last minute and you are swamped with other work that has me concerned about my son's college success.

Hope this long report is of some value to others who have been interested in the OpticBook, I hope with more experience I can give it a better rating than my current experiences.

[EdwardA]

I still find the Plustek very reliable for scanning books. I do some scanning of other items like sheets of music and it works well. But I would only consider this scanner if you're really into scanning books. Since the book can lay easily on the scanner with the spine of the book on the edge of the scanner, it makes scanning books a breeze. In order to get this scanner I had to contact the company directly and order it from their US division.

Jim Nuttall

Jim, I sure would appreciate your additional comments about the OpticBook. As you can see from long post I have been unimpressed with the scanner and am considering returning it. The only advantage that I can see is that it is less likely to damage the spine of the book if you use the scanner to scan one page at a time with book hanging over the side.

Have you done a comparison with OpticBook and using ABBYY FineReader Pro (or whatever OCR you are using now) between the one page method AND scanning the book as facing pages with OCR set to look for facing pages and to split them into two pages? In my brief testing I did not find any improvement in scanning one page at a time and it add significant time to the project. I am glad you have had such good experiences and it is one of the things that got me interested. Thanks for any information.

[EdwardA]

This flatbed scanner is not a good value and I do not recommend it. The glass is much closer to the edge than on other scanners and this can be an advantage in certain circumstances as follows:
If you are unable to get a good scan with this or another flatbed by scanning two-pages at once the OpticBook might help. The other scanner probably did poorly because the book is thick and/or the margin near the spine is very narrow and because of book curl you get a poor scan. Will the OpticBook do better? With the OP you can scan one page at a time with part of the book hanging down off the side of the scanner. THis may allow pushing the spine in such a way that you get better alignment and a better scan. In my testing of over a dozen books my conclusion is that for the types of books I scan that in perhaps 3 or 4% of the situations the OpticBook would give better results. If you scan tons of books; have money to burn; or value your time at a high rate, then eventually the OpticBook will pay for itself.

So briefly, if you already have a flat bed and are happy with it then unless you meet the criteria of my last sentence above, then I'd suggest skipping the OpticBook - I think you'd be disappointed. If you do not own a flat bed at all or are needing to replace one then perhaps paying around $235 for the OpticBook makes sense so that you have covered all of your flat bed scanning needs including books with narrow margins at the spine. ut recall that for me I estimate that in 95% of my book scanning the $85 Canon flat bed that I also have does just as well as the OpticBook.

Cons to the OpticBook
1) Terrible tech support
2) Not a good value
3) Sales/distributor gave incorrect information

!) When OpticBook did not work well with OmniPage Pro 15 (it went into a calibration cycle on every page after the first one if scanning multiple pages), I called tech support. I idnicated the error message I had gotten from OmniPage scanner wizard which had indicated that only some of the test OmniPage wizard likes to do were able to be run. The person knew that OmniPage was sometimes problematic but he only said that earlier Omni versions like before 11 seemed to work fine. He never explored what the problems were with the scanner set-up wizard. He said he'd have to email to the product manager in Taiwan but it might take 2 ro 3 weeks to get a response. Never got a response and it is now 3.5 weeks. As I indicated in prior post, I called OmniPage and they simply told me to use the WIA driver rather than the Twain driver and this solved the problem. OpticBook should have known this but did not.

3) Sales/dsitributor all but guaranteed that OpticBook would work well with OmniPage Pro 15 and that was one of my criteria in purchasing. Yes it does work but they did not know and did not tell me to use the WIA driver.

I also tried to get the original poster to share more recent experience with this scanner as he was very satisfied with it. Unfortunately he has not responded. Hope this information helps any of you make a good decision as to whether the OpticBook would be a good tool for you.[/u]

[feddup]

The optibook was about $260 if I remember correctly. That's quite high despite it's special book properties. I thought I'd let people know about a deal i saw. I usually don't buy refurbished products and after some printer woes I'm not a big epson fan but the Epson 2580 scanner (refurbished with one year warranty) is being sold for $40 shipped. I read some reviews of the unit and it seems well liked by buyers. Anyway if you want a cheap scanner.
I tried posting the link and something goes wrong everytime. Go to www.epson.com and search for the 2580.

[EdwardA]

I ended up returning the OpticBook for a refund as it is only of value in very limited circumstances as I indicated in previous post. In addition it would be of value in these two additional circumstances:

1) If you have a rare book or a book of very high value and want to put the least amount of stress as possible on the spine/binding then using the OpticBook and scanning one page at a time would put least stress on the binding.

2) If you have a large format book (probably something that is more than 8.5" high) then this is typically too large for most flat bed scanners. If you are unable to rotate such a book 90 degreee on your current flatbed AND get a good scan then the OpticBook would most likely do a much better job because its glass is very close to the edge of the case. While my son has a few text books that fit into this category it is just not a very high perentage of the book scanning that I do and hence the reason for the return. As stated before an inexpensive flatbed (as cheap as $40 refurbished Epson just posted above) combined with OmniPage or ABBYY OCR software will do as good a job as OpticBook in well over 95% of circumstances - for some people's use it'd be 100% of the time.

[D.Leikin]

I have tried to scan an old yellowish paperback with my old digital camera, then fed the snapshots into Abbyy ScanTo Office in bunches up to 15 jpeg shots, and … got 100% OCR accuracy despite page curls, tilts, variable light, uneven background, etc. I don’t know what makes abbyy do its job, but I figure I would never touch my scanner unless I need to digitize some high-quality graphics. The only inconvenience in using camera instead of a ‘normal’ scanner is one needs an assistant to thumb through the book. However, one gets paid in full by the dramatic increase in productivity – normally it takes less than 5 s to thumb, sight at, and finally shoot the page, so that ‘scanning’ a 200 pp book is done in about 15 minutes.

[nextupjoe]

I want to thank the authors of posts here. The information is extremely useful.

I've been scanning books for 5 years. I use an CanonScan N650U. It was around $50 when I purchased it. OmniPage Pro 9 came with the scanner. Both are 5 years old now. This system has opened new worlds to me. I am a fairly weak 'visual' reader, but can plow through anything via audio.

Like those posting here, two problems continue to frustrate me. My scanner is slow. I get 2 pages a minute scanned. Scanning a book is much easier when there is a football or basketball game to watch. A 2-3 hour game is about all I need to get a book scanned.

Second, there is the problem of spines. I treasure books, so the idea of breaking one into pages for scanning is not an option. Basically, I found that I can live without 5% of the words. Loss of a word against the spine is simply part of the process.

Of course, I would like to do better with both issues. I've been looking for a faster scanner from day 1. I have not found one. The comments here remind me of the frustrating hours I've spent testing scanners in hopes of finding a better solution.

My own attempts at scanning with a digital camera have never been successful. The reports of success suggest I should try, again. Maybe I gave up too quickly.

[D.Leikin]

Hi

Just wanted to make some comments on the use of OCR with digital cameras which might probably help cope with this technology.

Upon experimenting some I’ve got an impression that the only software that seems to successfully recognize images from digital cameras is abbyy products - abbyy has specially tweaked their OCR algorithms to make them work with cameras. (I don’t want this to look as if I’m doing kind of advertising because, in fact, I don’t.) I’ve also tried other programs to OCR low-quality images, including the “#1” solution from Scansoft, but had never had any luck with images from curved and unevenly lamped pages.

While abbyy's Finereader seems to be the only OCR program designed to work with cameras, I’m nearly sure that another abbyy’s OCR solution, ScanTo Office (STO), is using quite the same OCR technology – I was getting quite the same results with my camera with both programs. I’d highly recommend you trying one of these programs; both of them have trial versions. (However, STO is way cheaper and is only about $50. As for me - I'm quite happy with STO.)

Experimentally, I have found that STO has about 99% recognition accuracy even for 1600x1200 jpeg images from standard paperback-format pages. This seems to present a lower limit estimate for a camera of 2 million effective pixels. Although STO sometimes complains about insufficient resolution of such cameras it would nevertheless do its job fine. Other OCR programs I tried were simply refusing to process the same images. If you need to scan larger formats, say A5, you would most likely have to use a camera with at least 4 million pixels or more. (High-quality optics and larger matrices are also crucial for getting good images, of course.)

Also, shooting to jpeg files can help save both time (these files are processed faster by the camera) and space (as these files are much smaller in size than tiff).

Hopefully this stuff is of any help to you

P.S. Have missed to mention that abbyy’s site has a large section relating some general tips on how to use their OCR with digital cameras.

[nextupjoe]

D.Leikin,

Thanks for the additional comments. They fit with my experience. I've signed up for a trail version of FineReader.

Have you successfully scanned many books with a digital camera?

Joe

[D.Leikin]

Not too many, Joe. Primarily, some technical stuff and odd chapters I needed to look at. I’ll hopefully do more when I find a way to make shooting less tough on photographer’s spine.

[nextupjoe]

>I’ll hopefully do more when I find a way to make shooting
>less tough on photographer’s spine.

Scanners at least have the 'process' (setup, page flipping, download to PC) established nicely. With the digital camera idea, one is forced to purchase the 'process' equipment (or find it).. book holder, page flattener, camera holder, light, 'shutter trigger', etc. If you do a 300 page book every week, as I do, all that process stuff has to be well defined, easy to use, and easy to pack/unpack. Of course, inventing the whole process has its own delights.

Joe

[nextupjoe]

Just came across a review of the OpticBook 3600:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/09/sc ... books.html

Charles sez, "I bought this scanner a year ago for my site Modern Mechanix and I have been in love with it ever since. I got it after a frustrating couple of weeks trying to scan magazines on my old ScanJet 4400. It is by far the fastest scanner I've ever used. Full color pages at 300 dpi take around 5 seconds. Scanning a 70 year old magazine that's has printing all the way to the inner margin with a really tight biding is still a pain in the ass, but without the glass flush to the edge of the scanner it would be nearly impossible."