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Just slice the spine off, and run it through a sheet fed scanner. I know, I know - Sacrilege!

But you can also just set the book on a table, open it, and photograph it with your phone camera. The result is perfectly legible on your monitor.

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I love the idea (as long as they are not rare out of print books). Then burn the loose pages of all the books you've scanned in a bonfire to complete the ritual. The books have now transcended the physical realm and it felt really wrong while doing it. History warns us that people will be next, are they right?

Rare out of print books are, of course, rare. The vast bulk are relatively worthless in the used market.

I once asked a special collections librarian in the US to scan a rare book. This is a perfectly normal, common practice in some libraries; for example, I've gotten scans of rare books in a library in Salzburg e-mailed to me for something like twenty euros. This one librarian, however, hadn't heard of that, and the only method he could think of to do it was the one you suggest—slicing the spine and running the pages through a multi-page scanner, and he was horrified at the idea. A long and frustrating conversation ensued as I tried to convince him that I was not trying to get him to destroy rare books in order to digitize them.

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