You'll need to go into synaptic and install Xsane. However this may be a little
out dated.

See my reply to Barry, i.e. I intend to go to 10.04 very soon.
Will try Xsane then.

If you are really still using Ubuntu 8.10 then your options are going
to be restricted. There are Epson scanner drivers but these will most
likely call for supporting packages which will no longer be available
and/or be later versions that are incompatible with 8.10 !

Looks like you'll be stuck with scanning to memory card and copying to
Ubuntu that way - other option would be to upgrade Ubuntu but from
8.10 the only way to do that would be a clean install, way too old to
actually upgrade !!

I am fairly new to Ubuntu. I have a 10.04 disk on order
and intend to do a fresh install as I have nothing apart from my data files to
back up.

See you when you have 10.04LTS instead and we'll see where we can go
from there - might even find it just works anyway