Test Drive: OpticBook 3600 Book Scanner

I’m guessing that most of the subscription databases your young researchers employ let them email articles home for later digestion—and that’s a great thing. I’m also guessing that you feel frustrated when your students ignore your quality print resources for lack of similar convenience. I feel your pain.

In my school library, I try to narrow the convenience gap between print and digital resources by offering free paper copies and scans of materials. Unfortunately, conventional scanners and copiers do a poor job of copying from books—especially large ones. Text near the spine valley gets cut off, and kids have difficulty aligning books, resulting in plenty of mis-scans and, ultimately, students avoid printing altogether.

With some simple design tweaks, the OpticBook 3600 solves many of the problems unique to scanning books and, in a pinch, it performs reasonably well as a general purpose scanner.

The main hardware innovation of the OpticBook is a scanning glass that faces the user in landscape orientation and runs to the very edge of the copying surface, allowing each single page copied to lie flat on the scanner—no spine smashing necessary. While you can scan only one page at a time this way, the process is pretty speedy, about eight seconds per page. The clever software can even accommodate changing page orientations. So as you flip the book over, scanning page to successive page, the software rotates every other page 180 degrees, keeping page tops, well, on top. The resulting scan sets are ready to save or share, and you can do so in several ways.

The software lets you OCR scan to convert pages to editable text, easily create PDFs, or save the scans in your choice of image formats, in monochrome, grayscale or color, and in resolutions up to 1200 dpi. While you can customize these choices, both the software interface and the friendly panel buttons provide users with a simplified set of options. My favorite is the email option, which saves scan sets in small files and automatically opens up Outlook.

The OpticBook 3600 book scanner is an affordable way to add some digital save-and-share convenience to your school library’s print collection.