We have Kurzweil for Windows. I am scanning like there is no tomorrow, and just can’t keep up with the demands. I wish I had the luxury of time to edit the books I have scanned! I was going to spring for a pile of ebooks for my students for the summer. Does anyone know if they are compatible with Kurzweil? Do they come through as text or graphic? What format would I download them as? Do I need to purchase additional software to make it work? Do ebooks include editing or will have have the same reading mistakes as when I scan? Thanks for any information you can provide!
Kurzweil will read just about anything - rtf, txt, doc, html and pdf. Yes, text and graphics will show up in Kurzweil. For more info you can look at the specs at http://www.kurzweiledu.com
If you are looking for books with just text, there are a number of places you can purchase from. These should be fully editted and readable.
http://www.ebookmall.com/
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/
http://promo.net/pg/
http://www.ebooks.com/
http://www.fictionwise.com/
If you are looking for a “library” type program, you can subscribe to http://www.bookshare.org - they have subscriptions for schools and have thousands of books in several different formats, including Kuzweil. http://www.accessiblebookcollection.org/ - I believe this one is similar to Bookshare in that you can subscribe to it.
I totally understand about the scanning as I’ve been doing that for my dd this year. She just started using Kurzweil in October and I’ve been scanning her Social Studies book. If you are getting a lot of errors, you might want to check your scanner program and see how current it is. The newer ones produce fewer errors.