Book scanners like the Plustek OpticBook 4800 ($800 street) are definitively niche products. Most people don't need to scan book pages very often, and for occasional scans of a page or two they can usually get away with using a standard flatbed scanner, despite the shadows that tend to show up at the binding where the page lifts off the flatbed, and despite the visual curving of what should be straight lines. If you have to scan book pages very often, however, or scan more than a page or two at a time, you should consider a book scanner, and the OpticBook 4800 should definitely be on your must-see list.

Like the Plustek OpticBook 3600 ($249 direct, 3 stars) that I reviewed more than seven years ago (and is still available at this writing), the OpticBook 4800 combines hardware and software features designed specifically to make book scanning easier.

On the hardware side, the platen extends to the edge of the scanner. This lets you put the scanner at the edge of a desk or table, so when you lay one side of a book on the platen with the spine at the edge, the facing side of the book hangs straight down along the side of the scanner. The result is that the page you're scanning lies flat. There's no shadow at the binding, and the text lines stay straight in the scan.

On the software side, the scan utility offers a number of small conveniences, like being able to automatically rotate alternate pages 180 degrees, as you rotate the book one way or the other to position it on the scanner.

The Basics

Setting up the OpticBook 4800 on a Windows Vista system was standard fare. The scanner comes with an assortment of useful software that installs by default, including programs for optical character recognition (Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint), document management (Newsoft Presto! PageManager 7.2 and Plustek's own DI Capture 1.0), and a combination photo album and photo editor (Presto! ImageFolio 4.5). There's also a Twain driver, which will let you scan directly from most Windows programs that include a scan command.

Except for the photo editor, all of the programs are at least potentially useful for both book scanning and for general-purpose scanning. However, the scan utility and Twain driver are both designed specifically for books, and they lack features like automatic backlight correction and color restore that you'd expect to find in a photo scan utility. Similarly, because the edge of the platen comes to the edge of the scanner, with no raised area around it, it's hard to line up a photo or sheet of paper for scanning, with no hard edge to line it up against.

Scanning

Plustek gives you several choices for starting a scan, including black and white, grayscale, and color buttons on the scanner; calling up the Twain driver from a program; and calling up the scan utility from your computer. I found the utility the easiest to use. To scan, you put the book on the platen, note whether the first or second page you scan will be upside down, and set the utility appropriately to rotate either even or odd pages by 180 degrees. You then pick a destination file format, which will normally be either searchable PDF or, if you want to edit the file, RTF.

One nice touch that helps speed up the process is that you can scan as many pages as you like, one at a time, into a single batch before the processing step, which sends them to FineReader for recognition and then saves the file. For safety's sake, you can preview each page before scanning to the batch, to ensure it's positioned correctly on the scanner.

In my tests, it took about 9 seconds to prescan each page and 9 seconds more to scan it at 300 pixels per inch (ppi) in grayscale mode. If you include the time it takes to turn pages and set the book on the platen, you should be able to scan roughly 2 pages per minute. Black and white scans are faster, but grayscale generally gives better text recognition, and the grayscale scans were easier to read on screen. Note too that thanks to the LED light source, which doesn't need time to warm up, the scan times are consistent from one to the next.

Other Types of Scans

Although the OpticBook 4800 isn't really designed for general-purpose scanning, you can use it for photos or documents. As a photo scanner, it offers good enough quality for casual use, which is to say you can scan a photo to send as email or print at what you might think of as snapshot quality. However, if you want high-quality scans, you won't be satisfied.

Similarly, the scanner and its software did reasonably well on our standard OCR tests, recognizing Times New Roman text at sizes as small as 10 points and Arial text at 8 points without a mistake. However, without an automatic document feeder, you have to scan each page individually, which is a chore.

Also worth mention is that the OpticBook 4800 lacks two potentially useful features. First, there's no simple way to move the scanned, recognized text into your eBook reader, the way you can with OmniPage Professional 18 ($499.99 direct, 4.5 stars) with its Kindle assistant. Likewise, there's no simple way to move the text into audio format, as you can with both OmniPage and the Plustek BookReader V100 ($700 street, 3.5 stars) (which is basically the OpticBook 3600 with different software). You can certainly find other ways to handle either task, but it would be nice to have these features built into the OpticBook 4800 software.

All told, the OpticBook 4800 makes an inherently time-consuming chore faster and easier than it would be on a standard, general-purpose flatbed. And by letting the pages lay flat, it does better-quality scans too. It's not as fast or easy as book scanners that put the book in a V-shaped cradle and then "scan" both facing pages at once by taking pictures with two digital cameras, but those book scanners tend to be more expensive as well. It's not quite Editors' Choice material, but among flatbed book scanners, it earns points for being fast, capable, and easy to use.

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