(For starters, please don’t respond “Just go to anna’s archive” or something like that; they have a lot of stuff, but they don’t have everything, and sometimes the quality of their scans are less than stellar).

I’d like to be able to be able to easily scan some of my books and get decent-looking PDFs as a result.

I have a flatbed scanner, but in my experience, you have to really really really mash the book flat up against the platen and practically break the spine to get a good quality image. Even doing this often requires several tries to get it right. I can do this, but it’s very labor intesive, very time-consuming, and probably not great for the book being scanned.

I would love to have a dedicated book scanner—a scanner specially designed for books; I’ve seen some for the academic market that have /\ shaped platens that automatically turn the pages and so forth, but they often run to the tens of thousands of dollars.

I’ve also seen scanners that look like an oversized itty-bitty book light that are placed above the spread of an open book; I don’t have any experience with these, but I’m not sure how good the end result is.

Well, so if anyone can recommend a relatively easy and quick way to scan my books and get a decent output, I’d be happy to hear from you.

P.S. I didn’t mention epubs anywhere because I can’t stand them (if they work for you, great, but not for me!)