[SGVLUG] An OCR Inquiree?

[Chime Hart via SGVLUG]

Well, I installed several OCR solutions here in Debian, such as
ocrad, cuneiform, tesseract, gocr, probably others.
Anyway, I would really like to scan a left-and-right page of a book at the same 
time, actually a same scan. Some may call this sideways or esque. When I was in 
windows, Openbook had this option.
There is a commercial OCR product called "Abbyy" but now they are only offering 
a Linux version as an sdk for developers. There's actually a download link for a 
tar.gz which becomes a .run   but they will not provide a cereal number.
So can any1 please suggest an OCR package in non-graphical, which would offer 
sideways scanning?
As weird as this is, I have an HP scanner which has no power button-and-seeming 
no software way of switching it off. Thanks so much in advance for any guidance, 
just wanting to convert to plain-text
Chime