Shilling for the C-Pen 20 Scanner

I don’t usually plug products on the blog, but I’m going to make an exception for the Ectaco C-Pen 20, the pen scanner that I’ve been using to organize the research for my book on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals:

I don’t know how others work, but I write a very detailed outline of an article and then cut-and-paste all of the quotes (and other information) that I need into the relevant section of the outline.  If I do my job right, that master document is all that I need to write the article itself — I don’t need to refer to, or lug around, the original sources themselves. The problem is that it’s a very time-consuming process, because I have to find some way to turn the quotes in the books, articles, and archival material I use into electronic text.  I used to do it the hard way — typing all of the quotes by hand.  But no longer!  Now I use my C-Pen.  It’s ugly, but it works incredibly well.  You use it like a highlighter: you place the pen on line of text you want to scan, push down gently until the light comes on, and drag the pen across the text.  The text then magically appears wherever you place the cursor on the computer screen — in a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, etc.  The pen scans text as small as 5-pt and as large as 22-pt, works on almost any font (except very ornate ones), has no problem with highlighted text, and is very fast: you can scan just as quickly as you can highlight.  The angle takes a bit of trial-and-error to get right, but once you get the hang of it, its scanning is remarkably accurate — I average around 95-100% accuracy per paragraph of text.  The pen is also smart: if you are scanning multiple lines of text, it automatically eliminates the hyphens that break up words that extend over two lines, avoiding the need to go back and eliminate them manually.

I could go on, but you get the picture.  The C-Pen 20 is a remarkable device, and I highly recommend it for all academics and students.  (The pen is designed for PCs, but will work on a Mac that runs VMware or an equivalent.)  Best of all, it’s even relatively inexpensive: Amazon is currently selling it for $121.79 (US).