Patent ID: 7362418

Claim:
A duplicate apparatus, comprising: a plurality of document feeding units each configured to feed documents; a control unit configured to control reading of images on the documents fed by the document feeding units and recording and outputting of the images to a recording medium; and a plurality of operations-reading units that allow operations by a user and that read image data of the documents, wherein each of the operations-reading units includes: a switching request unit configured to request the control unit to enable said operations-reading unit, and a state detection unit configured to detect whether said operations-reading unit is in usage or in standby; wherein the control unit directs the state detection units to detect states of enabled of the operations-reading units when a switching request of a disabled operations-reading unit requests the control unit to enable said disabled operations-reading unit, and the control unit enables said disabled operations-reading unit when said enabled operations-reading units are detected as in standby.