[Bob Russell]

Well, I'm afraid there has been a change of plans. I finally sat down this morning, intending to wrap up the second part of the review this Memorial Day, and have sadly discovered that both my draft and the associated screen shots are missing. As quite a bit of time has passed since I wrote that draft, I don't have a lot left in my memory. With no time to restart it, I'm going to have to just cut my losses and call it quits.

But I did want to make a few closing observations, with some of the things that did stick in my memory.

First of all, the OpticBook scanner is definitely the device I would recommend to the novice to book scanning. With my instructions and the OpticBook, it should be relatively straightforward and painless, and is certainly very reasonably priced. It does take a number of hours to get through a typical book, but as others have said, you can get used to the process enough to watch tv while you do it, and then you will spend much more than a few hours actually reading the book, so for some of us it will be worth the effort for certain books.

To put it in context, there are other alternatives also. For example a dedicated two-sided sheet scanner with automatic feed would be a faster way of scanning a book that you are willing to dismember before scanning. This approach would also be about the same price range. In that case, the work really boils down to breaking apart the book. Then the sheet feeder and software pretty much handles the rest. You can search the MR forums and will find one that is mentioned fairly often with respect to scanning.

Another option is to buy an all-in-one scanner/printer/fax/copier type device. I have the Canon Pixma MP530, which claims an auto sheet feeder and two sided copying/scanning/printing. Unfortunately, it does two-sided activities by using the paper path to rescan or reprint as necessary. So on the negative side, I think that the sheet feeder only holds something like 25 or 30 pages, and it's not real quiet nor small. Also, there seems to be an issue between the Canon scanning software and the OpticBook software conflicting, so it may not be possible to use both for book scanning on the same computer. And the Canon printer, while great as an all-in-one, is definitely not as nice a choice as the OpticBook for flatbed book scanning, nor is it especially easy for sheet scanning of disassembled books. On the positive side, it does get the job done if you are willing to do it the "hard way", it works great in the functions it's intended to do, and I think I got mine for about $150 or so, which was unbeatable as I needed a printer anyway. So I basically got the book scanning for free. But I would still think that a lot of people might want an OpticBook even if they already have an all-in-one printer/scanner.

There are also some more expensive overhead scanners, one or two with automatic page turning. If you are doing commercial scanning, this would probably be a better option, but be prepared to pay $10,000 and up. In the future, I hope to see good overhead scanners appear with prices less than $500. Camera prices and quality seem already good enough to fit into a scanning solution at that price point.

As far as the process, it's pretty straightforward. You start the software and set up the project and parameters as I have described. You put the book flat on the scanner and hit the scan button. Then you see the page on the screen as you rotate (and flip the page if needed) and repeat. If you mess up a scan you can delete the image and rescan.

When you finish the scans, the software will assemble the results into a pdf file, and can also do ocr on it to produce an rtf file. Or maybe a Word file that you can save as rtf from Word - I don't remember the details. The only problem I ran into on my older PC was that if you have an extremely long book (i.e. pages in the high hundreds), you probably need more than the 750meg ram that I was using or it may never finish the conversion.

I can't emphasize enough that this is a great solution if you have no experience scanning and you want a straightforward approach that will work on any typical book without damaging it, and you aren't the type to come up with all kinds of clever workarounds.

Bottom line - If you plan to scan a lot of books, I'd stick with the OpticBook if you want an easy solution and don't want to destroy your books. The "near edge" scanning is a huge benefit, and it's nice to have a dedicated book scanner which won't require books to be broken apart. But I'd consider a fast two-sided sheet feeder scanner (like the Fujitsu ScanSnap) if you consider the book destruction both acceptable and not too much of a pain in the neck.

My apologies once again for this quick wrap up, but I guess a full write-up just wasn't in the cards. If anyone else out there with an OpticBook wants to supplement this info by sharing their thoughts on the scanning process itself, we'd love to hear from you!