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
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