[wayrad]

Finereader (at least the full version, I don't remember about Sprint) will straighten lines as part of the OCR process (it can even deal with an upside-down page!). Setting your scan to grayscale (some use black & white; see which gives you the fewest OCR errors) will reduce file sizes; color probably doesn't hurt but is a waste of resources unless you need it for an illustration.

If you don't have book-optimized presets in your scanner software, you'll likely need to do some playing with the scan settings to get the best OCR results, so I wouldn't advise accumulating a huge backlog of scans before acquiring the OCR software.