This handheld scanner looks like an admirable connector of the physical and digital worlds.

When I wrote my book about the history of green technology, I availed myself of every digital resource I could get my hands on. JSTOR, Google Scholar, Google Books, all the proprietary databases I could get my hands on at Berkeley. All of it. But there were times that the resources I needed -- ephemera, books, etc -- were not available in a digital format.

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For example, the precursor to today's National Renewable Energy Laboratory was called the Solar Energy Research Institute. The documentation of SERI's first 10 or so years of existence were rather well documented in technical reports and such -- but those reports reside in a musty library in Golden, Colorado. No one else had access to them, and I only had a few days to get as much information out of there as possible. So I brought a camera and painstakingly photographed hundreds and hundreds of documents. It was a huge hassle and the quality of the digitization was adequate but nothing more.

So it is with excitement and dismay (why didn't I have this?!) that I introduce you to the PlanOn ScanStik, which was just announced today. About the size of a big fat pen, the handheld scanner lets you simply roll the thing down a page to capture it. They say it takes about four seconds. Mind you, I haven't had the chance to play with it, but from afar, this could be amazingly good research aid.

Flatbed scanners are great, but you don't really want to lug them around and I always worry about the bindings of old books because of how you have to press them down to get a good scan. The ScanStik seems like it would have been a great tool for me, although at $160, it's about $100 more than I'd like.