Dear Folks, After glowing with my success in actually being able to record/burn my book "To Paradise and Back Again" on to a CD, I looked around me and wanted to continue to record my other books/stories to CDs. Not for any sort of profit, but just to get them recorded on to a more up-to-date media to preserve them. When I set my mind to record the little book I wrote, "Pilgrimage to Our Roots," the exciting genealogy story of the trip my sister Norma and I made to Germany in 1983 when we traced our Housman/Haussmann family history back to the mid 1400s, I couldn't find it anywhere on my hard drive nor on any floppy disk that I have. I was in a state of panic until I managed to dig out the original printout of it on paper. It was what I had typed in my computer in 1987 and printed out at the time. Now I had two choices. Either try my OCR program in hopes of scanning the pages into words or retyping the whole nine yards. Thank goodness the original printout was scannable for my OCR program to read it. BTW, my program is OmniPage Pro version 9.0 by CAERE. It looks like it has been updated to version 12.0 by now. Nonetheless my version is still awesome. Obviously, I chose the OCR route first and it actually worked with the hard copies I had. Thank goodness for printing out stories in good quality print (I was using my dot-matrix printer at the time!). Granted, I've spent hours changing the font, paragraphing, margins and all of that sort of jazz but I'm down to the last page or two of scanning the story. I know that eventually it will be properly stored off my computer and on to a CD. But the more I work with the story the more I realize that I can now also insert scanned photographs into the story to give a better picture of our adventure. And that's what I'm working on right now. It will be the first time that the story will have pictures to go along with it. The bottom line to all of you is this. If you have written ANYTHING that's worth saving, first print it out with good quality print. Go ahead and store it on your hard drive or on floppies for the time being. But look ahead to the time when your computer might crash (gasp!) or when your floppies will become outdated. But in any event, you'll still have your hard copy that with a good OCR program will be able to read and your story will still be preserved in electronic form to share with your family. vee