Siemens is marketing the scanner as sort of a digital highlighter for busy executives. Instead of highlighting passages from various pages of reports and marking the pages with folded corners or paper clips, they could could scan in the selected text. They envision executives trapped on planes or in taxis, scanning away. The company says that accuracy improves over time. If you carefully follow directions and hold the device upright and scan smoothly, you'll get beyond the beginner's problems that I experienced, they say.
Journalists are another target market for the new product.
Judging by the number of reporters who showed interest in the gizmo, there might be a ready market in newsrooms. Clearly, OCR technology has come a long way, and Pocket Reader is an interesting application based on that progress. But I'm not convinced that the technology is there yet. I don't know about executives, but journalists are not known for our patience. I'm not sure how many people will survive the learning curve to actually use it.