"A digital copy of each would have been great."

A good scanner with automatic sheet feeder is almost essential for books. Laying single sheets on a flatbed is extremely time consuming and produces pains in muscles you didn't know you had from the repetitive motions. Clean separation of the pages is essential, so you need a sharp knife and a steel straight edge to guide it.

I started off with a rather expensive HP multipurpose that claimed to be able to feed a page, scan both sides of it, and feed the next page. It turned out that its preference was to scan one side and eat the other side. It's still an excellent printer, ink jet at half the page cost of my B/W Laser, so I'll eventually get my money's worth if it keeps running.

My current tool is an Epson single pass autofeed - not exactly cheap, but reasonable for what it does. If I select pdf output it assembles pages in the order scanned into a pdf, but for multi page 2-sided stuff I've found it a lot faster to scan to jpg one side, which gives a separate jpg file for each page. Flop the stack over and scan the other side. The first side pages have to be renumbered to odd pages, which is trivial with a simple batch file. The second side though is in reverse order so the order has to be reversed and the pages renumbered to even numbers. Once they're all in order, my PDF converter is drag-n-drop to assemble a PDF from the jpg pages.

I found it easiest to have a separate batch file for each "number of pages" to flip the even numbered pages at the right place. Not as difficult as it might sound.

When the HP jammed on a page, it was impossible to get the jammed page out without tearing it to bits and fragments. When the Epson (rarely) jams, a quick pull on one handle opens the entire feed path and the "jammed page" falls out cleanly. Enormous difference.

My 8,000 page Chevy maintenance manual (4 volumes each 3" thick) did take about 3 days (Flimsy Paper and frequent rescans of individual pages that "missed"), but a typical 300 to 400 page book is usually a couple of hours, once you've got the method down pat. The scans aren't quite all perfectly nice and straight, but good enough for my needs so I rarely bother with rescans. Unfortunately since I scan and save at "production quality" and moderate compression to preserve printability, the PDF files are larger than I'd hoped, but there's always a trade-off or two.

I've managed to produce about 750 PDF files in my "Books" folder, most of which are books or pamphlets, with a few individual pages mixed in (Individual scores from music books, etc). The Epson scanner is barely 8 months old, and accounts for nearly all of the useful scans.

Now if only there was a decent scanner for those oversized Art Book pages... ... (The cheapest scanner for page widths over 8.5 inches that I've found was $1,200. I'm still looking.)

John