It's a good question, actually, and one I can't believe I have cause to ask in 2017, especially since things haven't really changed all that much in terms of choices. And yet here I am. What a coincidence! The only difference is that I'd consider the blindness solutions you list, because they do have a unique advantage: they can scan in the background, while you are reading. Yes, a small detail, and one I've regarded as mostly academic in the past, but since I have a SARA CE appliance and it must surely be replaced as it becomes obsolete (it's already been succeeded by newer hardware), it seems to me that the blindness solutions must be given due consideration.

But there are other choices. ABBYY FineReader worked well for Mac and Windows, when I last tried it. There are the smartphone-based solutions, like KNFB Reader, or others. There's the built-in OCR engine in Windows 8 or above, for which there are free TIFKAM apps that will use it. There are the screen reader OCR features of JAWS or the NVDA add-in (the latter using the cloud). I have a solution that I rolled together that uses the Azure computer vision APIs, and I don't know what DocuScan Plus uses except that it too is cloud-based.

But the essential question in 2017, after all these years, must surely still be: which is better, OpenBook or Kurzweil 1000?

Relevant topic is here. Relevant rant is here.

Hello,
The scanner comes with a DVD that contains ABBYY Fine Reader, which is the software that is used for scanning, and converting printed material (text books or simple printed documents) to Word or PDF. The OCR engine is Fine Reader, which is inside the program ABBYY Fine Reader. So, you do not need to buy extra software to convert your books to word. It's been more than two years since I started using Fine reader and I've not been disappointed by its performance. Note that the performance of the program depends on the scanner, and the scanning quality is dependent on the scanner. Never buy an all-in-one printer which provides the three options; printing, photocopying, and scanning. That won't help much in producing a legible document free of grammar mistakes and jumble characters. Plustek is so far one of the few companies that produces scanners which are designed for book and document scanning. The others focus mainly on photography and films as well as negatives. Remember that throughout your experience with these scanners you may have to look at your document for any mistake that is not well recognised by the OCR engine. This happens because the scanner is not the best in class, since if you really want to have a professional scanner that gives premium results, you will need to at least pay 3000 dollars. There are also more expensive scanners that go up to 10,000 dollars, but they are used by big copy rooms, prestigious universities, and publishing houses. Ah, I forgot to tell you, I do not personally own the scanner I recommended, but I plan to buy it in september, one month before my school begins.

@Sebby, In my view, I find Kurzweil 1000 superior to Open Book as it really offers many more features, one of them being the ability to open and read epub files, something that Openbook cannot do. I read many books with Kurzweil and I enjoy the experience. Kurzweil also has a good feature at recognising languages when converting printed material. It is not limited to two languages like Openbook, but you can select as many languages as you want. Plus it has two engines; Fine Reader 9.0 and Nuance Omny page. It is also faster in processing and converting documents. In addition, it offers more options related to document formatting. Something that Kurzweil lacks is the difficult set of commands. It should be actualised in my opinion to more popular commands such as those of JAWS and NVDA. I wouldn't say Kurzweil 1000 deserves 1000 dollars though, neither Openbook does. It should be at least 700 dollars or less, since, if you purchase Office package, buy ABBYY Fine reader 12 which costs 199 dollars, and install NVDA, it won't go more than 450 dollars and you may get even more professional results than using Kurzweil or Openbook.

@Afrim well yes, K1000 has a weird keyboard structure and that's probably a selling point for OpenBook. Also the bloat of K1000 does also scatter lots of stuff on the system for all the functionality whereas OpenBook seems a bit leaner. Ironically, it is OpenBook that no longer supports XP.

And neither has an inaccessible document editor, as Abbyy does. So, I guess it's partly down to a preference of how much of a trade-off you want of convenience and functionality. If Abbyy FineReader's viewer/editor is still not accessible, then I think probably I'm still moved to use one of these self-voicing monstrosities, just because the reading-machine paradigm really is a very successful and enjoyable one. But of course everyone is different.

@saiteja Yes there are free programs for Windows and Mac, actually there are free web services including cloud.space and Google Docs. If you Google it, you'll certainly find them ... but I can't possibly vouch for the provenance of anything I haven't mentioned. There's also the Windows 8+ modern OCR API, for which again apps are free and Open-Source.