I never before believed the claims of companies that sell optical character recognition (OCR) software-those programs that turn scans of printed pages into editable text. That's because I know how to multiply. When the companies claimed "99 percent accuracy," I translated that to roughly one error on every line. And that, in my opinion, was unacceptable.

Then last fall, I had a revelatory experience. I was trying to sell an old book of dolls on eBay, so I scanned a page and told Microsoft Office Document Scanning to save it as an image. When the program prompted me for a file name, the name it suggested corresponded to the scanned page's headline.