I just did a quick search for scanners and there seem to be several quite adequate ones available for less than you suggest for Dragon NS.
When I wrote patent abstracts in the past I always scanned the documents and ran them through Optical Character Recognition software which dumped them out as word-processor files. If you are scanning a good copy like a book there shouldn't be too many errors to correct.
On the other hand I recently acquired a dictation machine (small, hand-held) which outputs mp3 files to the Dragon software on my computer. I found it relatively easy to train in a short time and I'm looking forward to trying it some more when I begin writing again after the Christmas/New Year break.
My choice would be the scanner with OCR because it takes a few seconds to scan a page but minutes to read it out loud. Either method will generate errors but I think the scan and OCR will give you more accurate punctuation.
Just my opinion - I hope you get more responses to help you decide.
PS if you scan - don't forget to exclude the page numbers and whichever method you use only input a chapter at a time because there's nothing worse than getting to page 99 out of 100 when there's a power outage.
When I wrote patent abstracts in the past I always scanned the documents and ran them through Optical Character Recognition software which dumped them out as word-processor files. If you are scanning a good copy like a book there shouldn't be too many errors to correct.
On the other hand I recently acquired a dictation machine (small, hand-held) which outputs mp3 files to the Dragon software on my computer. I found it relatively easy to train in a short time and I'm looking forward to trying it some more when I begin writing again after the Christmas/New Year break.
My choice would be the scanner with OCR because it takes a few seconds to scan a page but minutes to read it out loud. Either method will generate errors but I think the scan and OCR will give you more accurate punctuation.
Just my opinion - I hope you get more responses to help you decide.
PS if you scan - don't forget to exclude the page numbers and whichever method you use only input a chapter at a time because there's nothing worse than getting to page 99 out of 100 when there's a power outage.
![:-\](/s3/kboards.com/data/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
