OCR on a reader?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by elizilla

My sig other has a funny story he tells, of when he was a computer operator in the days of timesharing. They had a report they ran every night. It was huge - two full paper boxes, which is what, ten thousand pages? A truck picked it up the same time every morning, around dawn, and ferried it to the customer site, so they've have it when they started work.

One night the printer was down, and they couldn't get it done before the truck left. So he was tasked with calling the user, first thing in the morning. Everyone thought the user would be upset. But here's what they said: "At the very end of the report, there's a two page summary. Can you please just fax it to me? That's all we ever look at."

D'oh!

Sounds familiar.

About halfway through my tenure at the bank I mentioned previously, we moved. They'd gotten a good deal on space in a building on the west side, and consolidated a bunch of separate offices, mine among them.

For several weeks before the actual move occurred, preparations took place, including disposing of stuff they didn't want to move. They had the wheeled canvas hampers used by the US Postal Service for packages, and were tossing out a couple of hamper loads a day of waste paper to be recycled. Five year old G/L printouts people were keeping, "just in case..."

It's astonishing what you realize you can live without when you are confronted with moving it, and the effort convinced me large organizations ought to move every 5 years or so, simple to force people to throw things out.
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Dennis

[HamsterRage]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Sounds familiar.

About halfway through my tenure at the bank I mentioned previously, we moved. They'd gotten a good deal on space in a building on the west side, and consolidated a bunch of separate offices, mine among them.

For several weeks before the actual move occurred, preparations took place, including disposing of stuff they didn't want to move. They had the wheeled canvas hampers used by the US Postal Service for packages, and were tossing out a couple of hamper loads a day of waste paper to be recycled. Five year old G/L printouts people were keeping, "just in case..."

It's astonishing what you realize you can live without when you are confronted with moving it, and the effort convinced me large organizations ought to move every 5 years or so, simple to force people to throw things out.
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Dennis

When we moved offices about 4 years ago, we announced that the new space wouldn't have a file room. A pretty big step for an insurance company. That was just the push we needed to get all of the business units to wrap up their "paperless office" projects. So there was a mad rush for 18 months, and we cranked out a lot of code to integrate electronic documents into our core policy/claims system before the move.

[recycledelectron]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

Better be careful about who you embarrass by converting their stuff to digital in front of them...

I'm afraid I embarrased a few coworkers when one mentioned a problem with a grade book (I'm a college prof) and my brain core dumped at the idea of using a paper grade sheet. I appoologized, and asked if she could explain it while pretending the problem was in Excel.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Not that I'm aware of, but why would you want them to? The use case you give would be an at best infrequent occurrence.
Dennis

If an ebook reader is supposed to replace a book, then it should let you read, write, and digitize books.



Tomereader, thanks for posting the link to the Eatco K-12! That thing is amazing! It's almost what I've been looking for.

Andy

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by recycledelectron

If an ebook reader is supposed to replace a book, then it should let you read, write, and digitize books.

Er, no. eBooks replace books. eBook readers let you view those replacements.

While it might be technically possible, I can't imagine trying to scan, OCR, and convert a paper book entirely on a hand-held device. If I'm going to do that, I'll use proper tools, if for no other reason than it will be faster and do a better job.

I have a multi-tool, which includes jackknife, serrated knife, saw, file, Phillips head screwdriver, several slotted screwdrivers, scissors, and pliers. It can do many things. It actually does them only in a pinch when I don't have the proper full sized tools available, and it takes a lot longer and the task isn't as well done because I'm not really using the proper tools.

The same applies to trying to create ebooks on a reader.
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Dennis