Handheld scanner/OCR Shop questions

[Oleksandr Moskalenko <malex@purdue.edu>]

  Hello everybody,

 I've considered buying a hand-held scanner that I could use for quick
text scans of journal article abstracts. However, after looking around
the Web (Google mainly + sane website) I still have my doubts as to
which one would present a good price/usability ratio. Please share your
own positive/negative experiences on this matter if you would be so kind.
I really hope to find one that I could plug into a parallel port of my
Debian laptop and have it reliably scan in the text I need. I'm thinking
of purchasing vividata's OCR Shop software to do the text recognition.
Does anybody have any experience with installing it under Debian?

  Thanks,
 
Alex.