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It's not a consistent crop, unfortunately. Because of how the pages scan you don't always have a consistent left/right gutter. You can't even say "odd or even" because some pages will have gutters much different than the other even ones. This is partially the occasional bad scan and partially an issue that arises with large books where the binding places where you can scan it a bit differently as you move through the book.
Adobe as a "remove whitespace" option which is a good way to take care of almost all pages, and then you just scan through the document looking for alterations that you fix manually. The trick here is being able to do this with a certain amount of speed. Removing whitespace takes care of about 90% of the pages fairly well so it only takes about 15 minutes to fix the rest.
All of my subsequent scans have been MUCH better than those I posted earlier for a couple of reasons (different book, harder surface to work on, and just getting used to it again) but the DX is so sensitive to any graphic data in the white area that the white area has to be perfectly clean for you to get a good display image. If there is so much as a few bits of graphic an inch away from the text than it will seriously screw up the display as the DX won't crop it and for most scans you really need the page to be pretty close to entirely text to be easily readable.
The ideal solution would be going through each image and cropping either as scanned (as DDHarriman suggested) or using an image editor to go through and carefully crop each image and then lay it back on top of a white background so they are all the exact same size and centered properly. The second part could probably be handled by a photoshop action/macro of some sort but I don't know how one could automatically crop properly otherwise. And it's moot because I simply don't have any sophisticated graphics programs anymore.
Too, there is an issue of speed. Ultimately, my goal is to scan a significant part of my book collection that I might be able to box some of it away and still have access to it. So I need to develop a 'fast' way to do this, or at least a way that allows me to do other things while it happens. So if I'm scanning, I can do this rather painlessly why watching some movies (did that yesterday, was nice to be forced to do something kind of relaxing!) but if I crop pages as I go then I have to give scanning my undivided attention for two/three hours - which will result in better scans, but the end result may not be much better as most the subsequent processes happen automatically once I set them in motion (except picking out the bad "whitespace" crops, which only takes about 15 minutes). So I can tell Acrobat to start procedure "x" and do something else while it happens.
I'll give Finereader a go - I've never really used much of the software besides the basic scanning stuff that comes with the OpticBook, but I'll probably scan something else today and see how it goes. I spent so much time working out the workflow that I'm not certain how long it actually takes from start to finish.
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