"One falling to bits" sometimes is a good thing since I got a decent auto-feed scanner that can handle "slightly fragile" stuff. The crumbly ones are easier to take apart to run through. Of course if it's really crumbly you get "bits" in the scanner that leave tracks on the scan, so there are limits. The pages are as intact coming out as when they go in, and I've considered "rebinding" a couple; but that's pretty time intensive and fairly old pages don't really take well to new glue and stitching.

A lot of my "accumulated wisdom" is obsolete technical stuff that takes a lot less space on the computer than on the book shelf, but cutting the pages apart to go through the scanner, with books in good condition, is "hard labor." Once that's done, dropping them through the scanner is just "button pushing," although minor "clever button pushing" is required sometimes.

I've tried taking some to the used book shops, but they're usually still laughing when I leave. The only ones that might be even remotely interesting to anyone else are worth more to me as digital copies than to anyone else, so I mostly just rip 'n tear as required.

John