This solution meets the requirement of being the fastest, but it falls over in a few ways.
first, a double sided sheet feeder is an expensive proposition, even though you can probably find a voscan compatible one. If you're in a commercial setting such as a university transcription service you might be able to justify the cost, but for an individual it doesn't really make that much sense. Second, you have to cut the books. The books themselves can be quite expensive. I preferred to double up with my classmates when I was in college. I scanned some one else's book pertimes because the books costed between 70 and 150 dollars a piece. You may want to resell the books and get some of your money back later. Again, if you're a professional transcription service this might be a good bet, but for an individual it's not really the way to go. Third, While there are good tutorials on making the whole voscan/readiris/finereader system work done by knowledgeable people in plain language, the fact of the matter is, setting up the duel software system initially takes a bit of extra overhead. I've never been much tempted myself. $200 to get two pieces of software and merry them together is reasonable enough on cost, but I know that most of my clients are not happy with the idea of two programs to do one job. I like the camera system myself. I'm not a professional transcription service, so the idea of taking half an hour to scan a book that used to take me three hours really doesn't faze me. The camera is portable so I can take it on the road if I want. I can also fold it out of the way to save desk space if I need to. I use an eyepal, because I had access to funding and because I got a corporate discount on it through my access technology company. I haven't had great experiences with it under windows, but on the mac it seems to work really well despite not being designed well at all from a software standpoint. I also have a hovercam T5V. While I mostly use it under windows with k1000, it can also be used with docuscan plus on the mac. Docuscan is cloud based and I'm not very happy with that aspect of it, but I like the hovercam hardware better than the EyePal. It feels sturdier and it's cheeper. Not to mention the docuscan software is actually built for mac as opposed to the jury-rigged eyepal approach. Out of pocket, docuscan and the hovercam are cheeper than the eyepal. If your alternative is an industrial grade double-sided sheet feeding scanner, then docuscan and a hovercam are going to be cheeper than that as well. If you don't mind splicing sets of pages together and you buy a consumer grade single sided sheet feeder, you could get one for a reasonable price. I don't think it would be as fast as a camera, but it would be less maintenance because you wouldn't have to flip pages manually. Hope this helps, Erik Burggraaf Follow my series of articles about setting up a small business through the ontario disability support program at http://www.erik-burggraaf.com/blog Ebony Consulting toll-free: 1-888-255-5194 or on the web at http://www.erik-burggraaf.com On 2013-09-24, at 1:55 PM, Anne Robertson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello James, > > If you can take the books apart, you'd be fastest with the kind of scanner > that will scan both sides of a sheet and also has an automatic feed. The > application VueScan can probably handle one of these and it produces very > good images. > > However, VueScan is not good for OCR. It will do it, but not very well. You > can, however, feed the file of images to ABBYY FineReader Express for Mac > which does an excellent job on OCR. > > Here is a link to the page showing which scanners are supported by VueScan: > <http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#supported> > > Cheers, > > Anne > > > On 24 Sep 2013, at 15:41, James Lee <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi All, >> >> I'm wondering what would be the fastest way for a college student to scan >> books with accurate OCR? >> I know there are cameras out there for scanning documents like hover cam and >> pearl, but I haven't actually used them. >> I could be wrong, but pearl is only works with Open Book, right? >> Can someone share their experience, and recommend what to buy? >> Especially comparison would be very helpful. >> Thanks so much, >> >> JL >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MacVisionaries" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. 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