MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Have you EVER wanted to scan that old book?

thinkpad · 02-14-2010, 09:25 AM

I've installed the software accompanying the OpticBook scanner.
The complete installation requires 410MB.

I found the PrestoSoftware to be not what I wanted so I uninstalled PageManager and ImageFolio.

Abbyy Finereader for turning the scanned image into text was really good, so far I have only found minor OCR errors, it even preserves the layout and you can choose to export the extracted text to Word for further editing.

The Finereader accompanying the scanner is v 6.0 Sprint. I have not yet decided if I will upgrade to Finereader 10. An upgrade seems to be €99. So far I'm not convinced it's worth the upgrade.

For scanning books the scanner is perfect. You use the buttons on the scanner to start up the software on your computer: "Book Pilot". You will be able to see a preview of the scanned image before you actually start scanning making the adjustments you feel necessary. One feature I particularly liked was that you can tell "Book Pilot" to rotate the picture on odd or even scans giving you a picture that doesn't need to be rotated afterwords. I have not yet found a workable solution for cropping the page not to include the page numbers (works when you don't have to rotate the picture but fails when the picture has to be rotated). For this I've used XnView (freeware image program) which has batch support so you can crop multiple files in one go saving you lots of time.

One thing to note is that each scan to .BMP picture (grayscale 300 dpi) takes up between 3-4MB. If you've got a book containing several hundred pages the amount of space needed will quickly add up.

The scanning process in grayscale 300 dpi takes 7-8 seconds from pressing the scan button until the scan process is ready and the image saved.

02-14-2010, 09:25 AM	#46
thinkpad David Posts: 1,808 Karma: 8916183 Join Date: Jan 2010 Location: Norway Device: Kindle, E.Edge (sold), Irex Iliad (retired)	OpticBook 3600 first thoughts I've installed the software accompanying the OpticBook scanner. The complete installation requires 410MB. I found the PrestoSoftware to be not what I wanted so I uninstalled PageManager and ImageFolio. Abbyy Finereader for turning the scanned image into text was really good, so far I have only found minor OCR errors, it even preserves the layout and you can choose to export the extracted text to Word for further editing. The Finereader accompanying the scanner is v 6.0 Sprint. I have not yet decided if I will upgrade to Finereader 10. An upgrade seems to be €99. So far I'm not convinced it's worth the upgrade. For scanning books the scanner is perfect. You use the buttons on the scanner to start up the software on your computer: "Book Pilot". You will be able to see a preview of the scanned image before you actually start scanning making the adjustments you feel necessary. One feature I particularly liked was that you can tell "Book Pilot" to rotate the picture on odd or even scans giving you a picture that doesn't need to be rotated afterwords. I have not yet found a workable solution for cropping the page not to include the page numbers (works when you don't have to rotate the picture but fails when the picture has to be rotated). For this I've used XnView (freeware image program) which has batch support so you can crop multiple files in one go saving you lots of time. One thing to note is that each scan to .BMP picture (grayscale 300 dpi) takes up between 3-4MB. If you've got a book containing several hundred pages the amount of space needed will quickly add up. The scanning process in grayscale 300 dpi takes 7-8 seconds from pressing the scan button until the scan process is ready and the image saved. Last edited by thinkpad; 02-17-2010 at 04:11 PM.