With the caveat that I have not used Win 8, I have Virtualbox installed on my Win7 64 bit PC with an XP Pro virtual machine which does have drivers for my Epson 640U scanner (not supported by Win 7) and save the scans to a directory which is shared by the Win 7 host OS. I also have some Linux virtual machines which can also use the scanner in the same way.
Provided you still have the installation media for XP (or even Win 95 for that matter) you could easily have a virtual machine to handle your scanner running concurrently with your host Win 8 applications.