I want to put documents and certain passages of books in my computer but I'm not sure how to do it. Obviously, I need a scanner and some special software. Will this be expensive? Name and address supplied DQ: You require optical character recognition (OCR) software. This electronically translates images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into text that can be edited on a computer. There are quite a lot of OCR programs available, with applications designed to work on Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems. Some of these are free while other applications can cost up to several hundred US dollars. Probably the best known OCR tool is a high-end product from Nuance Communications called OmniPage ( www.nuance.com/omnipage ). It runs on both Windows and Mac machines. But with a price tag of about US$500, it is not cheap. Google has put some money behind a Linux-based OCR system called OCRopus (code. google.com/p/ocropus). If you are a brave software code writer, you can try to use it. Another possibility is to scan some pages and send these to a site that does the OCR work. Still, that is unlikely to be a good solution if you have a lot of text. You will need a decent scanner that can handle a minimum of 300 dots-per-inch resolution. If you have a lot of loose pages, your scanner must have a sheet feeder. I'm a new iPhone 3G user confused about certain restrictions on buying applications from the online iTunes store. Can I buy apps from the store? John, Tung Fuk, Lantau DQ: There have been all kinds of discussions about why people in certain markets, such as Hong Kong, cannot buy music from the online store. But the reason is simple: the recording industry, not Apple, controls the rights to that content. Apple has spent a lot of time wooing the industry to allow the downloading of music in the United States and, gradually, in other markets. As for iPhone applications, these can be easily downloaded from the iTunes Hong Kong site. Just open iTunes, go to the Hong Kong site and you will find iPhone and iPod apps.