We use the excellent PaperPort Deluxe 8.0 software for scanning and management of our scans. PaperPort software is US$99.00 and works with just about any scanner (any with TWAIN drivers) but sheetfed ones work particularly well.

I recommend Visioneer's sheetfed scanner + PaperPort Deluxe bundles for US$199.99.

PaperPort has its own compressed file format that supports multipage scans: MAX. There's free PaperPort Viewer software for both PCs and Macs that can open these MAX files. Two other common formats used for multipage scans are multipage TIFF and Acrobat PDF. Note that TIFF supports several compression schemes so there are a number of TIFF formats.

Well I compared these 3 file formats (MAX, TIFF, PDF) to try and find the best one for multipage scans. We basically want a file format that produces highly compressed files that are readable with the least amount of hassle on both PCs and Macs.

Here are the results of the quick comparison I did:

Software: PaperPort Deluxe 8.0
(Adobe Acrobat needs to be installed in order to save to PDF format)
Scan Mode: Fax, Filing, or Copying (1-bit, 200dpi, text imaging mode)
Test Document: 9-page b/w text document

MAX = 227KB
TIFF multipage-group 4 = 198KB
TIFF multipage-class f = 341KB
TIFF multipage-uncompressed = 4.49MB
PDF = 287KB

Conclusion:

• TIFF multipage-uncompressed is clearly the one to stay away from.
  
• If you're sharing your document only with PC users, TIFF multipage-group 4 is best because most versions of Windows (95 or higher?) include the Imaging application that opens these files. And this file format produces the smallest files. (Mac users can install the US$15 shareware Tiff-Sight to view multipage TIFFs.)
  
• If you're sharing with PC and Mac users, PDF is the way to go since these days, just about every PC and Mac has Acrobat Reader already installed for viewing. A big issue with this, however, is PaperPort's requirement that the US$249.00 Adobe Acrobat be installed in order to save to PDF format.
  
• If you can get the users you share scanned documents with to install the free PaperPort Viewer software, the MAX format is good choice. (PaperPort Viewer is available for Windows and Mac OS 9 but not Mac OS X, though.)