One of the relatives I saw over Thanksgiving is an attorney. He was telling me all the ways I could leverage the internet to promote the church I serve. Most of it was what you’d expect (“start a blog”, “post your sermons as podcasts”) but the surprising one was this pitch he gave me for a Fujitsu ScanSnap. He basically shuffles paper for a living and the ScanSnap is one reason he can rack up so many billable hours.

The ScanSnap (Mac people like me would want the -M version, e.g., the S510M) is designed for unloading all the papers that clutter your life. It scans two sides at a time, 18 pages a minute, producing PDFs of the result. It includes a full version of Adobe Acrobat (though I’m not sure why; surely Fujitsu could have licensed Ghostscript if all they needed was software to pack up a JPEG into a PDF) and Optical-Character Recognition software from ABBYY. The only downside (check the positive reviews on Amazon) is the price. But still…

I’d heard this before from the usual sources, but now I’ve heard it from a flesh-and-blood paper-pusher. Huh!