Well, I bought a Canon LIDE scanner, and it has worked well-nigh perfectly. It gets its power from the USB cable, so I don't have to mess with a power supply.
I also found that I have "Microsoft Office Document Scanning" on my computer (probably from MS Works Suite, since I don't have Office). It does an extraordinary job of OCR.

But I still have a problem. Many of the books I scan from are fifty years old, and some are over a century old. Putting them on a flatbed scanner makes me cringe, because it's so hard on the bindings of these ancient books. I think what I need is a hand scanner, preferably a USB hand scanner. There used to be lots of them to choose from, but I haven't seen any for years. Anybody know of a good one I can get for a reasonable price - or have you other suggestions for scanning books? I wondered if I could get an OCR-able image from my digital camera....

-Joe-