Converting Books into electronic format with the Canon DR-2080C scanner

From: David Chien (chiendh_at_uci.edu)
Date: 07/14/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 18:01:40 -0700

More information on this scanner (search www.deja.com for the prior
thread(s) on this scanner in this newsgroup
eg.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=dr-2080c+chien&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=bla3e4%24h40%241%40news.service.uci.edu&rnum=1).

Canon DR-2080C USB2 & SCSI scanner with up to 39ppm (duplex, two sided)
scanning capability in both B&W and color. A ~$650+ scanner for rapid
conversion of printed materials into electronic format (JPEG, TIFF, etc.
file formats).

http://www.usa.canon.com -> Office Products 

---
Summary:
With the availability of high-resolution PDAs (eg. Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 
@ 640x480) and palmtop PCs (eg. Sony U50/70 series - see 
www.dynamism.com and www.vaio.sony.co.jp for information on the 5" 
1024x768 LCD, 1Ghz Pentium-M U-series), the upcoming products in the 
ebook reader field (eg. Sony Librie B&W ebook reader released in Japan), 
   and ~3lbs TabletPC notebooks (eg. Acer Tablet Travelmate C110 
series), it is now/will be possible to conveniently view and browse 
through electronic versions of Japanese study materials on an electronic 
device.
---
Pros and cons of the electronic book format:
The advantage of this are:
1) Portability.  You can easily carry hundreds of 'ebooks' with you to 
read in a 6oz to 3lbs device.  Similarly, you can easily store 5-20 
regular books in the space and weight of a single CD-R disc, even more 
on a DVD-R disc.  Now, taking all of your reference material with you to 
study anywhere is possible vs. a box of books.
    Perfect solution to those that will be moving overseas and don't 
want to spend more than the cost of the book purchase to ship the books 
overseas.  Or find space in a small Japanese apartment when you arrive 
,)= (eg. you can replace a 32-book reference set with just one DVD-R 
disc in jewel case on your library shelf)
    Naturally, if you've got a big hard drive on a laptop or PC, you can 
also leave the entire ebook collection there.
2) Markup as much as you want while retaining a pristine original copy. 
  You can markup text all day long, share electronically through email, 
and still have the original available once you're done.  You'll never 
worry about having a dog-eared copy of a book you can't read anymore 
because so many annotations have been made.
3) Easy to read.  If you enlarge the scan on the screen, or view the 
scan on a large TV set, you can easily view the finest of text and 
detail.  Words that were previously printed at 4-6 point now reads at 
several inches high.
4) Universal.  Similarly, if you scan everything into standard JPEG 
files, you can now view them using a PDA, digital camera, portable video 
player (eg. Archos), cell phone, TV-top DVD player that supports JPEG 
CDs, PC, etc.  One thing about trying to read the fine text in some 
Japanese books in book format vs. on a 80" HDTV big-screen in the 
comfort of your couch.  Great for those with poor vision.
5) Never fades.
6) Anywhere availability.  As the world becomes connected through the 
internet, you can even upload all of your ebooks onto your personal 
server or storage space online, and access them anywhere in the world 
where you have net access.  With such services like web hosting, and 
1GB+ email services, you can even email yourself the entire book and 
simply retain the pages as email messages online.
    Imagine, you can have a high-resolution, light-weight PDA or 
mini-notebook at Starbucks, login, and read and reference all of your 
ebooks during your studies.  No need to carry all of your texts to the 
coffee shop or library to study, and no worries about spilling coffee on 
them either.
7) Ability to 'collaborate' with teachers and other learners from afar. 
  Now, you can all view and talk about a book together online w/o being 
in the same room.  Very easy to ask questions about 'what's that I'm 
reading', esp. if you have the entire thing hosted online and accessed 
wirelessly.
Difficulties of the ebook format:
1) Browsing through text is difficult without generating thumbnails in 
an image viewer program, and even then, difficult to scan through the 
book as fast as with a normal paper book.  It's simply faster right now 
to scan through thousands of printed materials for something.
    Nevertheless, a fast image viewer such as ACDSEE Classic can let you 
scroll through hundreds of pages quickly if you use a mouse with a wheel .
2) Harder to discern the interrelationships between 
chapters/words/ideas.  eg. browsing through a dictionary lets one see 
quickly the nearby words; more difficult when you can only see one 
(usually) page at a time in ebook format.
3) Doesn't work w/o power or electronics.
4) Harder to annotate in as high-resolution as paper.  Currently, you 
can write with higher detail levels than with most mice/digitizer 
tablets will display on-screen.  Subtle handwriting nuances will simply 
be lost.
5) You must either photocopy the entire book first to scan, else run the 
book through a heavy duty paper cutter (service available at most 
Kinko's stores) to chop off the entire spine of the book cleanly in one 
pass.  Kinko's is the best method I've found thus far even though you 
have to pay a few dollars to have several books cut this way.  The cuts 
are very straight and clean, and far easier than any other method of 
preparing the pages for scanning.  Naturally, you can either retape/bind 
the book for use again, or simply toss into the paper recycle bin once 
you're done scanning the book.
---
Notes on the scanner:
1) Paper type will result in varying feed reliability.  Almost all types 
will feed fine, but a few super-smooth, crisp paper stock that some 
books are printed on will require some manual intervention.
    This simply requires you to move the stack of paper in the feed slot 
a little bit so the page-to-be-scanned will catch on the feed rollers 
and feed in.
2) Dusty paper & inks that wear off on rubber rollers on some books will 
result in dusty rollers, which will require cleaning with alcohol pads 
in order to restore full performance.  Otherwise, most books will scan 
w/o any trouble.
3) Boringly reliable otherwise.
    eg. the entire 753 page "Kodansha's Effective Japanese Usage 
Dictionary" printed on bible-thin paper was scanned into JPEG files at 
200dpi in under one hour (57 minutes) without any paper jams or pause 
resulting in a total scan size of 140 MB for all pages.  This easily 
fits on a 256MB flash card for use in a PDA, and takes up 1/5th of the 
space of a 700MB CD-R disc.  (ie. you can fit 5 such 753 page books on 
one CD-R, or about 32 such books on a 4.5GB DVD-R disc)
 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/4770028504/qid=1089761156/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-1357837-1411847?v=glance&s=books
    In about a day's worth of scanning (about 6-7 hours) in one case, 
2148 pages from 8 books were digitized in this way, taking up only 
~410MB, while jams occured less than 10 times.
  4) Good auto-contrast.  On most books, the contrast and brightness was 
automatically set well enough to drop out the texture and pattern of the 
paper itself, and only good black text on pure white backgrounds came 
out of the DR-2080C.  In a few cases, simply adjusting the contrast and 
brightness manually resolved minor cases where the auto-contrast failed.
  5) You can continue to scan while the scanner window is moved to the 
edge of the screen or minimized.  The only thing that appears above all 
windows is the small scan status window, which can be pushed almost off 
the screen.  This lets you load up the scanner with a hundred pages, 
then lets you do something else while the scanner scans.
  6) Unfortunately, while the scanner will continue from jams, cover 
open, and other delays just fine, there's no way for the user to roll 
back the auto-page numbering to a prior value manually.  You must use 
another program such as "Bulk Rename Utility" (free, search for it, 
recommended) to quickly renumber pages that were scanned with 
interruptions in the numbering.
----
   In the end, a highly recommended scanner for converting books and 
other texts into electronic format.

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