A technique provides an electronic summary of source content. The technique involves performing, on the source content, a content recognition operation to electronically generate text output from the source content. The technique further involves electronically evaluating text portions of the text output based on predefined usability criteria to produce a respective set of usability properties for each text portion of the text output. The technique further involves providing, as the electronic summary of the source content, summarization output which summarizes the source content. The summarization output includes a particular text portion of the text output which is selected from the text portions of the text output based on the respective set of usability properties for each text portion of the text output.