Yes, I've had the iPad missile launching problem, too. Because it's so curvy and made from slick aluminum, it isn't difficult to lose a grip on. I just dropped mine yesterday, scratched some metal off the side and dented the back. I think I should buy one of those rubber anti-skid protectors!

Scanning is time intensive. No doubt about it. I have, however, worked out a system that's pretty resilient but not easy to reproduce at home. At my workplace, I've got a Sharp MX-4101N that can scan double-sided colour at 300 dpi at more than 40ppm. The scans are sent to a server that does a quick OCR and returns a searchable pdf (I use Autostore for this). However, I find that the Adobe Clearscan results are so much better and I end up running this on a file-by-file basis on my desktop. This is very sssllloooooowwww. Despite having a Quad core Mac Pro, this is definitely a job that you start and forget about until half-an-hour later. For this reason, I use it selectively... mainly on books that are really long... or on very long magazines where the savings on the file size are significant.