Make paper documents digital without a scanner

Drowning in paper? Don't have time to feed hundreds of documents into your scanner? A Web service called Pixily will turn your hard copies into electronic documents you can store, share, and search online.

Sounds cool, right? There's just one hitch: You have to ship your documents to the company for scanning. That may be a turn-off for some folks.

On the other hand, there's much to be said for letting someone else do the heavy paperless-office lifting. Just stuff your documents into a prepaid envelope or box, then send it to Pixily. The service scans the stack, adds the e-docs to your online account, then ships the originals back to you.

When you sign into your account, you can browse, organize, and even search your documents. You can also share them with others and download them in PDF format if you need local copies. Want to add digital documents of your own? Just upload them to your library.

A free Pixily account entitles you to up to 200 pages of scanning and online storage, though you'll have to foot the bill for shipping. Same goes for the US$4.95-per-month plan, which raises the page cap to 1,000. You can get free shipping (and more storage) with some of the higher-priced plans, which start at $14.95.

I haven't tried Pixily myself, but that's only because I'm too disorganized to even gather my documents for shipping. If you've used the service, leave a comment below and let me know how you like it.