Geek question--OCR

After my mother's funeral a couple of years ago, my brother, my sister
and I divided up several thousand old family photos and vowed to each
scan our share and then send copies to one another. Well.....you know
how that sort of thing goes.....didn't happen. Until about a week ago.
Ursula had called and said she was coming to spend a week in January
to celebrate Siegfried's 60th birthday. Great, thinks I, an excuse to
go out and get a new scanner.....the old one has a some sort of driver
incompatibility problem with Windows XP....or something....whatever.

So, before buying, I did a bit of research and discovered that a local
vendor was selling a relatively cheap flat bed scanner that would do
everything I need it to, and the software package included an OCR
program. This is good, because I've been wanting to do a project that
involves scanning and digitizing some books for a long time.

Now, I've finished scanning all the old photos (and, speaking of old
friends, discovered many that I'd never seen before.....and thereby
hangs yet another tale) and started on books. The OCR software, ABBYY
FineReader 6.0 Sprint, does an adequate job of reading text but there's
nothing else that I really like about it. Copying and pasting to other
applications is fairly clumsy, there is really no tutorial.....just
some basic directions in the help file, and perhaps worst of all, the
user has very little control over the few operations it will perform.

I'd appreciate some input from anyone who's had experience with other
OCR software. What I'm really interested in is a lot more flexibility.

Thanks.

Wolfgang