As an alternative, I've been using a fast feed scanner to digitize my books. The obvious downside is that they need to be cut first.

I was inspired by this blog post: http://sealedabstract.com/?p=410

Also known as why the book industry does not face the same pirating problem the music industry does.

We'll probably see a lot more of things like this as eReaders keep getting more popular, and it won't be a whole lot longer before your local torrent sites are full of textbooks as well as the music and movies.

This is awesome. Anyone here ever built one? How well do they work?

I built a simple version which included the base, a light, and a camera. It worked well and I used it to scan my college text books in order to not carry them around. One of the best parts was running a ocr on the text books and being able to search them quickly while I was doing homework.

Which OCR - opensource or paid? What was your flow ?

Never built one, but I know about the basics of book scanning. The bottom bit basically just holds the book open, while the cameras take pictures of their respective pages. Two glass panes hold the pages flat while the cameras do their thing. The rest is taken care of on the software side, with algorithms to clean up the image and then perform OCR.

Previously, cutting the spine off the book and using a high-speed document scanner was the norm. This newer method, which is possible because of good, cheap digital cameras, doesn't involve destroying the book to get it into digital format. The operator has to turn the pages manually, but that's a small price to pay for getting to keep the original book.