How to read Japanese books above you Kanji level

After moving back to Australia, my kanji has gone seriously downhill. Some friends from Japan recently brought me over the 3 books of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 for me to study with and I quickly found I was utterly useless on my own without a dictionary.

Its a chicken-and-egg problem that I presume many other scholars of Japanese also have. Books with simple kanji are often targeted at younger audiences and can be painfully boring for adults. Books targeted at adults assume a kanji level much higher than I currently have. The end result is you get bored by either the content you're reading or the constant turning to your dictionary.

So my new Japanese study pipeline involves:

1. Scan a chapter at 300 DPI greyscale.
2. Run OCR over it.
3. Correct any errors. (I am seeing about a 95-98% accuracy rate so this is quick.)
4. Save the text as UTF-8 HTML.
5. Use Rikai-kun as necessary to get super-quick dictionary lookups when you need them.

This process is not as involved as it sounds. Its probably about 30-60 seconds per page on average amortized across all the conversion tasks. I would have spent MUCH longer than this fumbling with my dictionary if I'd tried to read it the traditional way. 

Also as a bonus, I am now building up a personal digital copy I can carry with me much more easily than the 3 hard cover books on the shelf!