I love my Plustek Opticbook 3600 scanner. I’ve had it for four or five years I think. I own thousands of books, and don’t often have enough time to sit down and just read. And I am also a relatively slow reader. I tried to learn speed-reading one time, but found that I just didn’t enjoy the books nearly as much. The Plustek Opticbook 3600 scanner is especially designed for scanning books. The scanning surface comes right up to the edge of the scanner. So you can open the book to about 90°, lay the book on the scanner, and scan one page at a time. I can scan pages at about 7 seconds each. Depending on how long the book, is I can maybe scan the entire book in a little over an hour. There is special software that comes with the scanner that aids in scanning books. The software will automatically rotate every other page for me. So all I have to do is lay the book on there, hit the button, flip the book, hit the button, turn the page, hit the button, flip the book, hit the button, over and over again. The scanner stores all the pages as images and has them as a collection within a project. When I’m done scanning the entire book, I can take all those scans and run him through another program that will make them into a very large PDF file, but I don’t do this very often for entire book. The PDF is just too big. It’ll also let me one them into an OCR program. That’s optical character recognition. This is what I do most of the time. I run the program the book through the OCR program, and it gives me the text output in a Microsoft Word file. Then I’ll spend another hour or so cleaning up the text. Removing the book title at the top of each page, and page numbers at the bottom of the page. Also spending some time fixing translation mistakes. I find that some things get translated poorly time and time again. Such as in running books you will often translate 10K into LOK. Or the word “I” will often get translated as the number one. So after spending an hour or more scanning a book and spending another hour or so doing a little bit of editing, I have the book in a text file. Then I take the text file and split it up into smaller files and run those through program called TextAloudMP3, which will create audio files of the book. These I will then burn these to CDs, and I can listen to the book in my car at my leisure, on drives to and from work, or other long drives. And if I ever want to read the book again, I just pull out the CDs and listen to them again. As far as photo scanning quality, the scanner is okay. I think the scanning quality for photographs on my HP scanner was a little bit better.
