I bought an Opticbook scanner a few months ago and love it. The biggest drawback for me is that the software is Win only and I'm mostly a Mac person. I was able to drag out an old Dell laptop and I use that right now, though a MacTel system is definitely in my future.
The combo of the design of the scanner and the software works very well, imo. There are buttons on the scanner itself that set up the software and preview, and separate buttons for the kind of scan you want: color, greyscale, or b & w. This makes the scanning go much faster because I'm not having to click on the computer, just press the buttons on the scanner. (I do set up folder, file prefex, etc., on the computer first.)
The downside is that one has to scan only a page at a time to get that nearly-spine-shadow-free scan. The upside of that is that the software will auto rotate every other page so all pages are right side up. Very nice.
(For books that aren't too fragile, I still use my Epson Perfection scanner because the software does a great job of scanning two pages into two separate files with one scan. The Opticbook software may also do this, but I haven't investigated it.)
I scan as tiff files, then pull them in Adobe Acrobat 7 (on my Mac) and do an OCR from there. (Usually - I have some scanned books that are from the 18th century and consequently use a long 's' which totally screws up the OCR. There's also the issue of thin paper (19th century books tend to have thicker paper which is a dream to scan, but 18th century books often have nearly see-through paper) and occasionally I have to use black paper inserts, which does add to the scanning time.
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If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask.
