I need some recommendations from you guys. To finally kickstart my thesis and get it done by this time next year (ambitious, to say the least), I need all the help I can get.

A friend of mine once used a scanner that could be used like a pen to directly copy selected passages. Something like this would be extremely helpful for me. But a preliminary search didn't really clear things up for me. It was used like a text marker and had text recognition.

Anybody has some experience and can nudge me in the right direction?

It was the C-Pen. Quite surprising there aren't more of those products generally available.