Please suggest scanner/software for 50 novels

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Rootman

I hesitate to add that converting a physical book to etext may also violate the publishers and authors copyrights as well. I do not beleive that the "fair use" doctrine applies to text scanned from a copyright source.

Not knowing what country you are in and what texts you want of course YMMV

In the US, format-shifting for personal use is almost certainly fair use. And I only say "almost" because there's no court cases to base that on, because nobody's been stupid enough to try to sue their customers for it. Nobody's been sued for making cassette tapes of their own albums for their own uses, either. Nor for reading aloud a book and recording it for their child.

Format-shifting for research purposes is somewhat *more* acceptable; that moves the purpose of copying into the "transformative" realm. Note that Google's cache function was ruled to be non-infringing.

Trying to keep from hijacking this into yet another copyright debate... hmm.

Jim should keep in mind that no OCR software is perfect, especially with books with nonstandard language. (Legal, medical, scientific, religious, sf/fantasy, etc.) With an autofeed scanner, the OCR checking becomes the most time-consuming part of conversion. Even with a flatbed scanner, the OCR checking is the most *annoying* part of conversion, because you can scan while talking or listening to music.

[Jim Thompson]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

the OCR checking becomes the most time-consuming part of conversion

Any other thoughts on best OCR software/scanner combination. I had been thinking a reliable ADF might be the most challenging part, but I now suspect reliable OCR is key. Which has few errors and makes correcting errors easiest? For example, if the OCR doesn't know if a word is "fire" or "flre", it might be nice if it could guess that it's "fire" by use of a dictionary. Any suggestions on ways to reduce the "annoyance" factor?

[Jim Thompson]

I have learned (I think):

1. PCMag review in (I think it was '08) suggested ABBYY or OmniPage depending upon ones needs.

2. People tend to prefer interface and support for ABBYY.

3. OmniPage may be better for people who want more customized automation or larger batches. For example it will permit creating a zone template that will remove standard headers/footers (page #s) from every document in a batch fed through the ADF -- whereas that would have to be done a page at a time in ABBYY.

4. ABBYY seems to have a relationship wit Fujitsu, so if buying a scanner and software, there might be less frustration with getting them to work well together.

I'm looking into OmniPage for my purposes. Trying to determine if I need the professional version and which ADF scanners seem most used with it. I'll report again when I'm smarter, or if you have insight, please enlighten me.