Best Printer for scanning books?

[Apostolos]

Seems nice, but i either should go all the way to build a proper DIY book scanner (something i'm not interest in doing) or abort the mission. I think the single camera with just a cut in half box, will not do the job.

Thanks for the tip though! I google diy book scanners and learned about something new!

 

[The Hat]

There is also a small consideration of copyright to be considered here, scanning a booklet for your own personal use is one thing but asking another’s to do for reward is breaking those rules.

Besides permission needs to be sought before you can use any printed material for public consumption..

 

[PeterBJ]

I wonder: Will OCR software only work with scanners or will it also work with images from a camera in .jpg format?

 

[stratman]

I wonder: Will OCR software only work with scanners or will it also work with images from a camera in .jpg format?

Yes.

 

[CakeHole]

Seems nice, but i either should go all the way to build a proper DIY book scanner (something i'm not interest in doing) or abort the mission. I think the single camera with just a cut in half box, will not do the job.

Thanks for the tip though! I google diy book scanners and learned about something new!

It depends how indepth you want to get, if its just the odd book the cardboard DIY rig i pointed to will do the job providing you got a decent camera and set it up right. Its quick and easy once all positioned correct, turn page with one hand press camera button with other, you can fly through the process.

There is also a small consideration of copyright to be considered here, scanning a booklet for your own personal use is one thing but asking another’s to do for reward is breaking those rules.

Besides permission needs to be sought before you can use any printed material for public consumption..

Lets not get into copyright, scanning and then selling a book is clearly wrong, i hope that is not what the OP wants to do. You can take copyright to stupid levels, all the upload pics of say Canon, Epson and HP stuff on here violate copyright technically, unless people all got permission from the manufacturers to reproduce their logos etc before uploading.

Copyright is one of those things where the morals and originality is right but over the decades has become bureaucratic in many ways. Going down the path of discussing copyright and the "rights" and "wrongs" of it is a never ending rabbit hole.

I wonder: Will OCR software only work with scanners or will it also work with images from a camera in .jpg format?

Yep it will work fine, does not even need to be paid for software nowadays, thers free stuff like...
http://www.paperfile.net/
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/OCRFeeder
in fact you can even do it online via sites such as
http://www.free-online-ocr.com/
http://www.onlineocr.net/
http://www.newocr.com/

No solution will be 100% perfect (even payware) but its waaaaaaay better than a few years ago.

 

[Apostolos]

There is also a small consideration of copyright to be considered here, scanning a booklet for your own personal use is one thing but asking another’s to do for reward is breaking those rules.

Besides permission needs to be sought before you can use any printed material for public consumption..

Copyright laws are always an issue but i think does not apply to my case. The books i 'm talking about are almost 100 years old. I think books before 1930 or so, are public domain by now.

 

[palombian]

Potential workaround... disable abbyy finereader's Services before updating Word and then turn them back on to their original settings as desired.

To be more precise, after I installed ABBYY Finereader, Word and Excel 2013 crashed when opened.
I had to search MS Technet to find the solution: remove Finereader (no problem for me, I bought the scanner for other purposes).

FYI: It was an older free version I found on the CD of the Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 2400 Pro, the cheapest A3 scanner (certainly second hand).
It is a CIS scanner without any dept of field, maybe not so good if you can't ply the book flat.

All what a printer that scans does is integrating a number of processes in an easy to use workflow.

The first step is operating the scanner and save the document in an image format (as jpeg, pdf, ...).
As far as I know all scanners - built into printers or not - use the standard TWAIN protocol, and you can interface them with standard software as VueScan (try to see if you like it).

OCR software is a next step, it reads the jpg or pdf and saves the result in a text processing format (as doc, txt, ...).

As already suggested, photographing the book and running an OCR reader afterwards on the images is maybe the best solution.
I did a few tests with Finereader on difficultly readable images and was impressed it could convert 100% to text.
There must be free versions available.

 

[stratman]

FYI: ABBYY Finereader... It was an older free version I found on the CD of the Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 2400 Pro, the cheapest A3 scanner (certainly second hand).

Maybe the latest version will work. You can download a 30-day trial free on their web site.

 

[CakeHole]

Just scrap Finereader if you have a full MS Office suite. You can use onenote in that for OCR...
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/14595/ocr-anything-with-onenote-2007-and-2010/
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/onenote-extract-text-from-image

If you have a earlier version of Office you can use document imaging...
http://www.documentsnap.com/using-microsoft-office-document-imaging-to-ocr-for-free/
http://printscan.about.com/od/softwareyouneed/ss/ocrsoftware.htm

Fuss free and you can run a spell check once you have run the OCR procedure to make sure it got it all correct.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

PlusTek makes several scanners that are specially built for books. They have a wide variety of price ranges, but all are cheap compared to the competition. Also, look at the do-it-yourself scanner forum.