[gazza]

Hi,

I have a very, very large library of traditional books. My wife, because of illness, can only use the iPod Touch although I am sure other equally small and suitable devices will come along.
I work as a journalist at very strange hours but often have short breaks of an hour or so.
The thought came -- why not scan in our own library and then we will have no problems with DRM?
The scanner we think is the answer is the Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus which is a tad slow but is very affordable -- say US $300 -- and outputs text in an OCR readable format.

The problem with every digital book I have seen -- including those I paid serious money for -- is the proof reading, the shining exception being Gutenberg. Google is a total farce. When a book has more than 1,000 errors something is seriously wrong.

So my idea is to scan in a book a day and proof-read -- a pleasant hobby -- into .txt format from which it can be used in many formats.
Does any reader have experience with this sort of thing and are there any major snags?

Gareth Powell in Sydney where it looks like we have a major storm blowing up