The Plustek OpticBook A300 book scanner is more expensive than the Plustek OpticBook 4800, but it can scan much larger books. It can scan right up to a book's spine, and its software makes it easy to scan facing pages without having to rotate alternate pages individually. It's worth a close look by libraries and other institutions, as well as archivists, looking for a professional book scanner. While it lacks the speed, convenience, and ability to safely scan delicate originals of a V-shaped book scanner such as the Atiz BookDrive Mini, it's more compact and sells for a lot less.

The A300 measures 5.2 by 24.6 by 15.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 17 pounds. The maximum scanning area is 12 by 17 inches, larger than the Plustek 4800, which maxes out at letter/A4 size. To the right of the platen are a button to call up the Book Pavilion software, as well as scan buttons for color, grayscale, and black and white scanning.

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The flatbed's design helps eliminate distortion, as the platen glass comes right up to the edge of the scanner, the main hardware feature that distinguishes it from a conventional flatbed scanner. When the A300 is placed at the edge of a table or desk, the book can lie flat on the platen, with the spine at the edge, and the facing side of the book hanging straight down. This eliminates shadows at the binding, minimizes distortion, and helps the text lines to stay straight. There's some risk that the book could fall if you don't watch it closely (when you open the lid, or by jostling the scanner), so an alternative is to move the scanner away from the table's edge and have the facing side rest on the table.

This is an issue that is avoided by V-shaped book scanners such as the Atiz Mini. With such a scanner, you place the book, pages facing upward, in a v-shaped cradle. A v-shaped retractable platen holds the pages in place. After the facing pages are shot by twin DSLRs, you lift the platen, flip the page, and shoot the next spread. This makes for speedy scanning while reducing the risk of damaging delicate originals.

Software
The A300 has pretty much the same software as the Plustek OpticBook 3800 and 4800: Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint for optical character recognition (OCR); Newsoft Presto! PageManager and Plustek's own DI Capture 1.0 for document management; Presto! ImageFolio 4.5 for photo editing; a Twain driver for scanning directly from most Windows programs that include a scan command; and Book Pavilion, a book-scanning program.

In testing book scanning, I initiated scans both from the Book Pavilion scanning utility (which lets you scan to different file types and resolutions, choose between different sources: books, magazines, newspapers, art magazines, select filenames, automatically rotate pages or not) and from the scan buttons.

I timed the A300 in scanning book pages at an average of 6.5 seconds per 300 dpi grayscale page after an average 5.7-second pre-scan. (With book pages, it's wise to preview the scans, as books can easily get knocked out of alignment.) Including the time spent turning the page and positioning the book on the platen, you should be able to scan at a rate of about 2.5 pages per minute. This is faster than the OpticBook 4800's nine-second prescan and nine-second scan time average at the same resolution. Colors looked bright and reasonably true; some grayscale scans showed added shadow.

As it is a flatbed scanner lacking an automatic document feeder, the A300 isn't ideal for scanning multipage documents, as you have to open the cover, replace the page with a new one, and close the cover when scanning each new page. The good news is that the combination of the scanner and Abbyy FineReader Sprint 9.0 did very well in optical character recognition (OCR), reading our Times New Roman test file down to 6 points with no errors, and our Ariel test file at 6 points with a couple of dropped periods but no other errors. I also tried some photo scanning: although the scans weren't up to photo-scanner quality, they were still quite good.

There's a lot to like about the Plustek OpticBook A300: its large scan area, the ability to scan to the edge of the platen, software that correctly orients facing pages, and relatively fast speed for a flatbed-based book scanner. It is worth considering by libraries and other institutions looking for a scanner to copy and archive books. It can't match a V-shaped scanner like the Atiz BookDrive Mini in speed, convenience, and the ability to safely scan delicate originals, but it can scan slightly larger books and it costs a lot less. In these budget-stretched times, that should be enough for many libraries and other institutions in need of a book scanner to give it the nod.