SubTitle: In dealing with Books, it's not the scanner that's important, it's the OCR SOFTWARE!
I have experience creating ebooks (pdf, mobi, epub) but my source has, to date, been nice text files supplied to me by clients. I got the urge the other day to try creating suitable text by scanning a pBook with my old Canon Lide 60 scanner.. so....
I obtained a copy of
ABBYY FineReader Express for Mac and installed it on my iMac ( Lion - OSX 7.2)
I fired up ABBYY FineReader and within minutes I was scanning. In less than 20 minutes "learning time" I was scanning multiple pages (Cut from book). The software is intuitive enough that I did not have to consult instructions or help.
With the Lide 60 it takes about 11-12 seconds to scan a 5.5x8 page. After the initial setup adjusting the scan you can just hit "scan" for every page and the scanned image for each page appears in a pane (see attached pic).
Scan as many pages as you like and then hit the "convert" button in FineReader Express and the scan is OCR'd to text. The output from the OCR conversion is a single RTF file. My six page scan turned out to be 2066 words. I then opened the RTF file in Pages (Apples Word compatible text processor)
I have yet to find one error and I've looked at the entire text.
The text even had proper paragraph indents and also proper BlockQuote indents!. (left and right margins/padding)
Perfect multipage scans loaded to my favorite text editor with almost no "learning curve" at all!
Lesson: A Good OCR program is worth the cost!
Attached is a screen shot of FineReader (Mac version) with six pages scanned. (Pic is reduced 40%)
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