[wayrad]

Gazza, I've done something very similar to what you describe on several dozen of my books. I have an Opticbook and it can scan 5-6 pages per minute. Started out with the Finereader Sprint (crippled Finereader version) that came with the scanner, but soon upgraded to Abbyy Finereader 8.0, and later 9.0 - either is a vast improvement.

All I really want to do is generate a plain old .rtf file (I read on a PDA, so fancy formatting would be wasted), so after recognizing the text in Finereader I generally save to Word (using the option to not save headers and footers, which gets rid of page numbers and running heads) and correct the errors there. Finereader has spellchecking capabilities, and lets you compare the scans with the output onscreen, but for my purposes Word is quicker, at least if I have the hard copy in front of me for comparison. The search and replace functions are particularly useful. At this stage I am just glancing through the text rather than reading it.

After that I save the document in rich text format. Then exit, reopen it in Wordpad, and resave it to reduce Word-induced file bloat (this might not be necessary if you saved to .txt). Then move it to my PDA and read it, bookmarking any remaining errors. Finally, fix the errors in the Word file, repeat the conversion, and replace the previous version on my PDA.

It's not as sophisticated as what many people here do, but for my needs it's fine.