[bookshare-discuss] Re: Question about scanners
- From: "Peter Scialli" <peter.s@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 13:30:00 -0500
Hi Judy,Knowing what your budget is for a scanner would help in suggesting
one. At Bookshare, there is a high speed, multi-thousand dollar machine
which can scan things very fasst. I personally have two scanners, one of
these is a sheet scanner. I also cut the spines off the books. At least
most of the time. My sheet scanner is a Fujitsu 5150. It has some letters
before the model number but I can't recall them. It is duplex so does both
sides of the page at once. It has a range of resolution settings up to, I
think 600 dpi which is too much for most OCR jobs anyway. It does about 15
pages per minute, so about 30 sides. I use Kurzweil to do the recognition,
but it comes with software which may work just fine. I think Fine Reader is
considered to be the best or among the best OCR products available
commercially though. The scanner may not appeal to some at first glance
because it is not a standard TWAIN scanner. It does plug into a USB port,
but uses its own proprietary interface. So Kurzweil, for example, doesn't
see it directly. Instead, it produces a high quality PDF file and when
done, auto launches Kurzweil for me. All of that is easy to set up and
works nicely. The cost was around $400.
By the way, there are some options for reconstructing chopped books.
Kinko, for example, will bind a chopped book with tape for a couple of
bucks.
Marissa who is in charge of the scanningoperation at Bookshare actually
does get the books rebound and then donated. Overseas, I think, but I'm not
sure. Previously, Andrea at Bookshare, now moved onto grad. school would
donate the books to a prison literacy program. Hope this helps.
Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Judy s." <mjstouff@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 05, 2005 1:06 PM
Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Question about scanners
> Hi all,
>
> I'm new to the discussion group but have been a bookshare member for a
> couple of years. Boy, do I appreciate everyone's work as it's such a
> great library!
>
> We're getting ready to buy a scanner in the next few months, and want to
> make sure it scans and translates the images into text well. I also want
> it to have autofeed (and possibly two-sided scanning), as I plan on
> cutting off my book spines and pulling out the pages (I can hear my
> librarian friends shuddering!) to scan them.
>
> I'm not visually impaired so I don't need to interface with the usual
> adaptive sortware for blind users - instead, I don't have much use of my
> hands, so I do everything with voice software which interacts pretty well
> with any ordinary software I'd need to run the scanner.
>
> I'd really appreciate any recommendations from this group on which
> specific scanners (and their prices) have worked well for scanning text,
> and which is the best optical character recognition software (and its
> price) for translating it. We have both windows and mac machines, but I
> think I want to run the scanner from the mac.
>
> I'm also interested in any hints on software that can handle translations
> of formulas and equations from a scanned image into print characters, as a
> lot of what I want to scan is technical books.
>
> Also, although I find it easiest to read text files and non-image PDFs,
> which format is best for submission of scanned books to Bookshare? We
> want to make sure anything we scan is in a form that makes it easy for
> submitting to Bookshare.
>
> Whew! I think that's all my questions, at least for now!
>
> Judy Stouffer, B.S., M.S., SFO
> mjstouff@xxxxxxxxxx
>
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