Very interesting to know that. My only experiences with OCR were with pages typed on a typewriter and the results were, even though the letters were not faded out mostly, poor. The OCR had huge problems with monospaced fonts. But that was some years ago, as I must admit.
And handwriting plays of course in a completely other league …
I think OCR has made great strides, at least with printed sources. For a number of reasons I use PDFPen Pro which comes with built-in OCR. I have found with printed documents, even when the image is quite degraded — say a scan of a photocopy from a book with stiff covers which has a significant curvature of the page and loss of luminance at the spine — the OCR will turn well over 90% into ordinary text that requires very little correction, certainly a fraction of the amount of effort and time that retyping the page would consume.
My only problem is that it doesn’t yet handle Chinese, though they tell me that will come in due course … no doubt at a significant price! 
Mark
Well, I’ve been using my Livescribe pen for two months and I can honestly say I love it. I even ended up buying a small notebook type pad as well as the A5 books, as it’s just easier to lug around (I like travelling light these days).
Although I didn’t finish NaNo, it has made a huge difference to me and it’s great to just plug it in and convert the stuff to text (using MyScript) and then plonk it into Scrivener. Because I don’t record sound, I’m using only a fraction of its storage capacity and I’m getting over a week between charges.
Pro-tip: If you get interrupted while you’re writing, check to make sure the pen hasn’t turned itself off while you were on the phone. Writing a few pages only to discover that you’re using “just pen & paper” can be a real downer.
That’s interesting. I thought the script-to-text converter for the Livescribe pen was Windows-only.
In case anyone’s interested, I wrote a piece on the Livescribe Echo here:
Good in meetings, not so good for thinking to oneself, I found. But the combination of (theoretically) script-to-text conversion, audio location (tap on the page to hear the recording you were making at the time you wrote that note) and “automatic scanning” is pretty compelling.