Plustek BookReader V100
The Plustek BookReader V100 is a book scanner to speech and MP3 device that easily scans books and turns them into sound waves or just spoken text on your computer.
Ease of Use, Performance: 18/25
Look & Feel: 21/25
Features 20/25
How much I enjoy 15/25
Total: 74/100
The Plustek BookReader V100 is a unique device that takes the written word for books and turns it into spoken words using a simple scanner. The Plustek BookReader is a simple to use scanner made especially for scanning books and turning the words into either an MP3 or wave file or simply outputting the words to your computer speakers.
The Plustek BookReader comes with a simple driver and BookReader program that installs easily and you can start using the book reader in minutes. Simply connect the USB cable and power cable and install drivers then restart your computer, once installation is done you can simply insert a book under the scanner cover and press a scan button.
At default settings the BookReader will scan a book and save the page to a file as well as start reading the book for you to listen to. The current page can be scanned in three ways, Text Scan, Greyscale Scan and Color Scan with each being different visual outputs of the same page of your book.
The Text scan will scan the book and show the book on your screen in the scanner/reader program as white text on a black background as it reads the text. The color will show a white background with black letters and the Grayscale is more of a direct scan of the page without any conversion to text.
The scanner has a set of buttons on the top for controlling the scanner but one side does not seem to work as labeled, it has OCR, email and some other scan function buttons but I could not figure out if they are even usable. The two functions of the scanner is for English and Spanish so this is not to change the scanner from one side of the functions along the buttons to the other.
I also read other reviews that also talked of this so it did not surprise me at all, as well as some other problems with the scanner reading text. If the text is a bad printing with a little too much ink near parts of letters the scanner will have a hard time getting letters and words scanned correctly.
This is also true of non standard English like a book I grabbed from C.S. Lewis, the Silver Chair and scanned to check out the BookReader. The Plustek BookReader has a problem with the old English that some of the book was written in and would not translate everything perfectly.
It did a good job especially with some more difficult to follow things like technical books about plumbing or computers where words are under pictures instead of in a nice block of text on the page. The scanner works well for text and did well around pictures as long as you use the grayscale button and not the others so it can follow the text in paragraphs around pictures.
The BookReader scanner does a great job of texting to speech and to wave or MP3 files that you can listen to without paying the extra price of an audio book. While the Plustek BookReader did a fine job of translating English text to speech it is not without its problems, especially with poorly printed books.
You also have to make sure that you hold the book as close as possible to the scanner edge so the edge of your page is captured by the scanner. Another overlooked feature is a sheet feeder so you can scan piles of documents such as printed pages from a computer.
The BookReader would make a very nice accessibility scanner but a feature to be able to scan individual pages in a stack would have made this device a perfect one for those situations. Other than that and the sometimes bad job of scanning some text the BookReader is well worth it for the job it does.
I have checked out the price of this compared to other scanners that do the same thing with some software and this one is a bit over priced at about $550 to $600. This would make more sense if it cost less or worked better but you can purchase a simple scanner and some software that will do the same thing.
While this may be the first scanner that outputs speech directly the price does need to come down before this is a viable option for the general public. Until then it does have its bonus features in an all in one solution for text to speech but at a high price tag.