Do you read a lot of books and/or magazines?

Maybe you love it, or maybe you're compelled to do so by some academic or vocational institution.

Do you use highlighter pens to mark important passages which you later have to type into your computer?

What a waste of time!
How would you like to capture the excerpts you want or need to remember with a simple sweep of the hand across the page?

No, this is not some super memory program, it's a gizmo that I found in a 20 lb. geek catalog, and I bought through Amazon. I've had it for two years, and use it daily.

How Much Reading is Too Much?
I read so much I'm thinking of joining Over-Readers Anonymous. I'm a chain reader. I pick up the next book (or books) before I finish the one I'm reading. Right now, I'm reading a collection of Emerson's essays, an out-of-print tome called "Law of Success", Jean Calvin's "Institutes", a biography of John Adams by Page Smith, and several other books.

When I find a passage I want to remember, or share with others, I reach for the black sheath on my belt (not the brown one containing the Leatherman Tool). The black sheath contains the C-Pen, an optical character recognition (OCR) scanner not much fatter than a highlighter pen. But what it can does puts messy highlighters to shame.

I just swipe the tip of the C-Pen across the lines of text that inspire me, and they almost instantly display on a seven-line screen on the side of the pen. If I want to edit, I just click the little button on the top of the pen which also serves as a scrolling 'mouse'. I can add text either by selecting letters from a list, or by simply writing with the pen on any printed page. (I almost always do the latter, since it's easier.)

The C-Pen holds more pages of text than I need it to. (It does a lot of other stuff, like serve as an address book and day-planner with alarms, but let's stay focused on why I really bought it.)

Right now, I have excerpts from 25 different books and several issues of Fast Company magazine in an easy-to-navigate file system in the C-Pen.

When I'm writing something and I want to use a quote or two that I have saved in the C-Pen, I simply plug it in to my PC and move the excerpts (a simple text file) over to the PC. Drag and drop, like most Windows programs.

Although I rarely do this, you can actually scan text right into your PC from a book. And there's a wireless gizmo available so you don't even have to plug it in to the computer. I didn't buy it, but you might want to.

The batteries last so long that I can't even tell you how long they last. And you recharge with the same little plug you use to download files.

It is literally a small computer with an OCR scanner that you hold and use like a highlighter pen. It's lightweight, so it won't drag your trousers down if you're wearing it on your belt. It's also sleek and attractive, but I would buy it if it were lumpy and hideous, because I need what it can do.

When I bought the C-Pen, I was actually in the market for a Palm-like device, which would have cost me $250-$800 at the time. I bought the C-Pen, which does almost everything I wanted in the Palm (day-planner, address book, notepad), plus it does OCR which no Palm could do, for only $179.

The Sad News
The Swedish company that makes C-Pen is smart in engineering, but stupid in marketing. Somehow they have let this useful little device languish on the American market. So, while you can still buy used and refurbished C-Pens through Amazon, if you want a new miniature OCR device, you'll have to buy the WizCom QuickLink Pen Handheld Scanner. It's got a few more buttons, but does much the same thing as the C-Pen.

If you have have any questions about this kind of tool, just post them to the comments section here.

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