Now here’s something that will make you glad you lived this long: It’s a pen-sized scanner that lets you scan the contents of pages from a book or magazine and store them for reading later.

Why would you want to do this? Well, we can envision a scenario in which you’ve borrowed a magazine and are in the middle of a fascinating article but have to get up from your comfortable reading position and you desperately want to finish that article or that chapter.

Instead of appropriating the magazine or book, you can take just the contents of a page or two by using Planon’s DocuPen RC800. It stores the data in the pen, which plugs into a USB port for download later. Scanning can be done in color as well, which makes downloading of photos and brochures and the like more palatable.

The memory component on this baby is 8MB, which is the equivalent of several hundred pages of black-and-white text or, correspondingly, three pages at highest resolution. You can also insert a MicroSD memory card for more storage capability.

You can have this handy device for just US$300.