Strategy: Scanning books - right up to the spine!
3 Keywords: Scanning, OCR, Optical Character Recognition
"I used the Plustek Opticbook 3600 for my psychology degree. It is designed to scan very well right into the spine of books, which is where OCR often fails on other scanners. This does make it bulkier than other scanners, but I found it extremely useful. It can also be used with larger books and has a quick one button scan that makes life easier.
That scanner really was a lifesaver for me!"
Quote
"During my course I often had to scan whole chapters of books, use OCR and then text-to-speech to read them. The text near the spine of the book would always look distorted and be read out as a series of random letters, which made the whole process almost useless."
- NeilTip
Advice on scanning and OCR - Keep glass of the scanner clean, try to scan complex sections separately or edit in the OCR program so complex tables, columns etc can be adapted and reading order can be set. Text does not usually need 600dpi try 300dpi. Scanning at higher resolutions (600 dpi versus 300 dpi) increases file size about three to four times.
