I don´t understand why people are still copy-protecting their online contents.

Copy-protection is futile. When it can be displayed it can be copied.

Microsoft delivers all the tools that you need. At your doorstep. For FREE.

More specifically, it is the Snipping Tool and Microsoft OneNote.

What the Problem is and How it is Solved

The problem is that some authors do copy-protect their online contents. Take a Kindle book.

I regularly buy Kindle books and I usually write a review after reading a good book. Check out this one here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quo-vadis-europe-george-friedman-book-review-martin-schweiger/

I hate it to manually re-type a paragraph of a book that I have purchased earlier.

So how to recite a paragraph of a such a book for a review, without re-typing it?

Do an OCR.

This is How you do Your FREE Screenshot OCR

Use the Snipping Tool and Microsoft OneNote. As shown in the short screencast video here:

 

In short words, first, take a snapshot of the screen area that you want to OCR.

Second, open a “New Section” in OneNote. Use the OneNote 2016 from the Microsoft Office 2016 package, and NOT the OneNote app that comes with your Windows 10 operating system! The OneNote app that comes with your Windows 10 operating system will also work but the OCR conversion takes longer as compared with the OneNote 2016.

Third, you copy/paste the snapshot from the Snipping Tool window into the new section in OneNote.

Fourth, click the right mouse button on the picture in OneNote, the following menu will open:

Then click on the “Copy Text from Picture” item and you are good to go.

Wherever you press “Paste” thereafter, you will have an OCR of the picture text.

That´s it.

Call to Action

Learn something new today.

Try it out now.

Open the Snipping Tool and take a snapshot picture of an online text.

Then copy/paste the snapshot picture into a new OneNote section.

Then copy the text from the picture from OneNote and post it somewhere else.

Then play around with OneNote (then try EverNote).

(Update March 2019: if you are unhappy with the OneNote recognition speed, then check out this article about a FREE and fast online OCR program)

Martin “OCR anything” Schweiger