I used my Opticbook yesterday for an afternoon of scanning. It went surprisingly quickly. (~300-page book.)
This was an old book (early 20th c) that had been well-used, so the spine was torn (though not entirely detached) and the binding was quite loose. One reason I choose the Opticbook over my Epson Perfection 3200 was that with the Opticbook I don't have to open the book flat. The Epson software is great because when I can open a book flat, I can set it up to scan each page into a separate file with one scan pass. Very nice.
In this case, however, I didn't want to open it flat for fear of damaging the book further. The Opticbook's design let me scan the entire book without any problems.
As I've mentioned before, I scan to .tiff files then pull them into Acrobat (I currently have ver. 8) and run OCR on the resulting PDF. One of the great benefits of this is that I can do searches to locate the information I'm looking for. A big time-saver over having to look it up in the physical book (even with a good index).
One of the best tech purchases I've made.
