The place I used to work had a hydraulic paper sheer that could cut a ream straight in half. I've also got the above mentioned Fujitsu Scansnap.

I started out by chopping the spines off those old textbooks I'd been lugging around and feeding them to the scanner. It was so easy, I started going by the used book store and grabbing handfuls of 50 cent curiosities.

It only took about 10 minutes to scan a book this way. The downside is that the book is destroyed. Think of it as a religious experience. The book can live on forever in the digital realm but it must sacrifice it's paper form to do so!

Right. A community exists for people who make their own book scanners: http://www.diybookscanner.org/ , but book scanning is really quite tedious and hardly worth it unless you really need one book a lot. There were previous discussions about this on HN in which the consensus was that book scanning wasn't really feasible for more than a book or two due to time.

This system doesn't, but you could do something like Google did to scan books for Google Books. In the book "In The Plex" Steven Levy describes the process that they developed. They lay the book flat on a table and have two cameras mounted above it at angles. They snap a picture, turn the page, snap another picture, etc. Then they have software which corrects for the curvature of the page. Seemed pretty clever to me. It's certainly not as fast as cutting off the binding and putting it through a sheetfed scanner, but it's reasonably fast and doesn't destroy the book.

Correct. As mcav mentioned scanning books is very complicated -- way more effort than I'm willing to spend.

And even if I could, I don't think I would. I like the feel of books in my hands.

eBooks?