There's a reason it's expensive to scan books. It takes forever.

I would make a list of all the books you own, and then sell them at a second hand book shop, and use the money to go towards ebooks of the same titles. Not everything is available as an ebook though.

Check sites like Lifehacker and Instructables for home-made scanning systems.

Scanning an entire book is VERY time consuming, but you asked! 8-)

It would be awesome if Amazon offered a physical for ebook swap program. Mail in your old, unwanted physical books and get a free or steeply discounted ebook edition. Amazon could keep and sell the used books, and make us more dependent on our Kindles.

Scanned books are not easy to read as the pages get stored as images. But if you want to go this way then you can simply buy a scanner and scan books on your own. It will cost you a lot less and you can do it while watching TV.

Dan Haugen, that's brilliant. Sign me up.

I agree with ANRA. The low tech way is to buy a scanner and just scan the pages to save as PDFs. Where you're going to have problem is that the books bend and you'll have to keep them as flat as possible. You could look for a handheld scanner.

It would be a lot less effort overall to simply admit to yourself that you are never going to reread those books and your notes. Give them a new life by passing them along to the next reader to enjoy.

If you must, take digital pics of some of the books and your notes as a remembrance of thoughts past.

Parnassus, yes. Yes. Yes.

I'd only bother scanning the ones you really loved.

Parnassus has a good point....can I have your books, please? (jk)

I agree with Parnassus. Keep the ones you really treasure and might actually read again, photograph or scan the pages of notes that you consider essential, and unload the rest. You have the basic contents available for most things through libraries (including inter-library loan for more esoteric things) as well as eBooks and if really desperate, used replacement copies.

My Studio has a Xerox Docucolor. It scans 60 pages a minute from a sheet feeder. If you could get access to one you could cut off the binding and scan each page and export as a pdf. Double sided pages are 20 ppm. From there you can ocr and change that text into any file format. I don't know much about epub and ebook, but I think it can be done. Or you could read it as a pdf. Converted as a text file you could convert the text to speech for an audio book, but that quality isn't perfect, tone and inflection are lost. I just scanned all my buildings documents and organized them with that machine. In other words, find a friend who has an office with an awesome scanner, they start @ $45K, used for $20K. Then decide if doing all this is worth it over the $10-$15 each for the ebook.

This might not be legal: http://www.ericmackonline.com/ica/blogs/emonline.nsf/dx/is-it-legal-to-scan-your-books-to-read-on-a-tablet-pc

In addition, the time it would take doesn't really even out with the money you'd spend to buy an ebook. I agree with the commenter who suggested selling your physical books and putting the cash toward ebooks.

Short answer: Release some books. Long answer: http://www.scancafe.com/ digitized my husband's deceased parents's documents well. That work is so tedious that we outsourced that comparatively small job even though we have scanners at home. Outsourcing the digitizing of a library would be prohibitively expensive for a private individual. Scanning it at home would take longer than a human life span. Have you asked the specialists at Library of Congress? They have extensive professional experience and can suggest practical alternatives.

For older novels and biographies that are readily available as e-books, its much less expensive to just purchase the ebook and sell/donate the old books. For textbooks, especially science, it would be easiest just to take the books apart and use a scanner with a double sided feeder if you're willing to take the book apart.

Personally, I've gotten ride of 80% of my library in the last 2 moves. Anything I hadn't read in a long time left, and I now have a nook. The beauty of the nook is that I can check out books from the library, so if I feel like re-reading a book, there are lots available to check out and read on my nook (or the hard copy if the digital isn't available). I have kept all of my relevant text books, since many of those cost $100-$250 each and are still great references for my work (I'm an engineer) but I keep most of those at my office.

As I reduced my library I thought I would dearly miss my old books (the same way I felt about going car free or not having cable tv) but I've found that I don't miss it nearly as much as I thought.

I'd also recommend a scanner that you can feed pages into. You don't need a fancy photocopy machine though - there are commercial scanners that will do this.

The greater issue is copyright law, and I'm surprised nobody brought this up yet. I'm pretty sure you're only allowed to copy one chapter, or 10% of any one publication. Otherwise, you need a special license to do the whole book. The only time this wouldn't apply would be when the works are in the public domain.

@KD_MUSE - I don't think people are unaware, just that it's not something easily enforced and thus, most people don't bother to say anything. I did think about saying something, though.

I've been trying to go paperless at home. My recommendations:

Books
1DollarScan

Photos
Scancafe

+1 to 1DollarScan; they run OCR too so your books have searchable text, not just images of the pages. They will also shred and recycle your books when they're done scanning them.

We recently divested of ~100 books. Before donating, we searched the iBooks/Kindle stores and downloaded a book sample. This gives us a virtual placeholder for each book... if we need to reference one in the future, we can quickly buy and download.

I'd really like to see Amazon/Apple/B&N step up and provide e-book versions when your physical copy is donated to a local school or library.

I'm also facing this problem! I love the idea of a bookstore buying back our books and giving us e-book credit. Amazon, I would become that much MORE dependent on you! I would do a trade-in so fast it's scary. (I thought I'd find a Kindle to be a nifty toy. I've been shocked at how much I LOVE that Kindle. It's replaced paper books to a degree I wouldn't have thought possible.)

I am also going to be gleaning through my books. There are certain things I'll be keeping- we all have our ways of deciding what we want to keep. But after 9 moves for work in the last five years, I have realized that packing and carting my library is just more pain than I'm willing to put in. (Besides, I favor small spaces).

Of course, the sort of geek I am... I'd buy the book in e-book, flip through my copy, transcribe the notes, and then send back the paper copy. Time consuming, yes, but I'd be okay with it. And I imagine, as I contemplated that level of work, that I'd find that there were books that I just didn't really care THAT MUCH for anymore.

Good luck with the digitizing!

I'm getting rid of a bunch of my classics and replacing them with ebooks from Project Gutenberg. They offer more 39,000 free ebooks in various formats. Their site: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Be aware that any option involving OCR is going to be unreliable even for printed text, and impossibly unreliable for handwriting. It will take hours of manual correction to get even printed text 100% accurate.

For the people saying "admit you're never going to read them again" -- how do you know? Some people don't reread, some people do. I reread a LOT. I go through my bookshelves regularly and get rid of the books I know I'm never going to read again, but that still leaves a lot of books, which I'm fine with. I just had a custom double-sided bookshelf/pantry room divider built for my loft.

For Jennifer, I think the only way to do this is to buy ebook versions and go through and transcribe your notes. It's going to take a long time, but less than trying to scan your books, and you'll end up with a much more useable result. And you can do it a few at a time until you're done. My problem would be stopping transcribing and starting reading as I went through them...

One trick to reduce anxiety when releasing many books at once is to list each book's author and title. I kept my list for years and was pleasantly surprised I never felt the need to refer to it or to replace a released book. Most of your fiction collection probably can be borrowed from your public library system.

I'd purge some if I were you, and I'd keep the rest without bothering with the massive amount of time it would take to scan your books. And I'd ask myself: what will happen 10 years from now?
Likely, your painfully scanned books won't be readable on the e-tablet or whatever of the future, as the formats will have changed 2 or 3 times by then, many of the books you now own in physical form won't exist in electronic format, and you'll regret having gotten rid of your library.

You know how many pieces of music never made it from vinyl to mp3? All the images that are not to be found online in any format? It's likely many of the books you love won't be available in e-format. Likewise, you never know when a system crash might erase your entire library forever.

Libraries are great but with cash-strapped cities cutting up their funding, maybe that inter-library loan might be difficult to get a hold of in the future. And that coveted book you'd like to read again might have been never returned from a customer who has moved several States away,

So, purge the cheap fiction, self-help books, textbooks you know to be obsolete, and lug around your books.
I'm about to move internationally in a few months, and my 2000-books library (and vinyl records) are moving with me. It's costly, but worth it.

They may just repeat many helpful responses here but, as I mentioned, you also could ask Library of Congress Digital Reference Section staff: http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-digital.html
You might be interested in their duplication service, although of course they're heavily invested in copyright legalities.

I understand your concern.

I scanned my professionnal library in order to gain space and be able to read my books from everywhere (via my Dropbox).

First I cut the bindings with a professional guillotine. Fortunately I could ask a colleague to do it for me.

Then I scanned the pages with a sheet-feeder scanner (an old HP scanjet 8250, certainly there are now cheaper and faster machines).

The scan was performed with Adobe Pro software which includes optical character recognition (useful if you want to Index the contents for later research) and bookmarking (useful to navigate quickly in the chapters with Adobe Reader).

Cutting the bindings was the most complicated part since I had to find a free access to a professional equipment.

Scanning and ocr'ing are automated steps, it is rather slow but you can do something else during these operations.

The most time-consuming for me was bookmarking the chapters, but this is an option, and you can do it with the current e-reading.

Cutting the bindings forbids reusing or selling the books, it's a choice I made. The final result is of great value for me in terms of space-saving, accessibility, simplicity of annotating and quoting, and reading comfort (thanks to ipad).

I've been in your shoes, I've donated 2/3 of my books to charities and local libraries after getting a kobo. I managed to get a lot of the older loved books from project guttenberg (www.gutenberg.org). Others, I've put on a watch list on some of my favourite ebook sites, and I've managed to get a lot of them on sale. Yes, it's a pain to purchase the book twice, but in the end, I've decided it's worth it if I love them. Much less pain than trying to scan.

I've downloaded some books that have been scanned into pdf format (mostly legal <koff>). Reading them is a pain - the page size isn't quite right for the reader, you lose a lot of benefits of the e-reader too, eg you can't change font size. I've also downloaded some rather questionable books too, with interesting typos ('rn' becomes 'm' and vice versa). I'm now sticking to the legit sites only.

Fujitsu snap scan 1500. Double side scan
40 pages in one minute. OCR. You'll be able to view/read on a tablet

It would be helpful to know what sort of books they are and what sort of notes you've scribbled in the margins. If they are profound observations on a writer's argument, then that's one thing. If it's just "OMG I LOVE EDWARD" in the margins of a paperback 'Twilight'...

The question to ask is whether the jottings are worth the hundreds or even thousands of dollars they'll cost to digitise.

As long as your books were published within the last 75 years, it is illegal to scan your books. No matter what anyone here says, whether you do it yourself or have a company do it, is it a violation of federal law. Books are copyrighted material. If you want them in a digital format, you have to buy them in a digital format. That's the only legal option.

Whoa I didn't realize my question had been posted and so helpfully answered! Thanks everyone!

Jennifer

We did this before our last move and were really glad in the end. Fujitsu Scan Snap (the more expensive one, and glad we went with that rather than the cheap one), had books guillotined at Kinko's, fed them through one book at a time.

OCR works great, actually. This is especially awesome for cookbooks since you can just search by ingredient that you have and don't know what to do with.

We use the same system for bills, etc, which is also handy since you can just search that Dropbox folder for whatever payment you're querying, and it pops up.

I would also agree that it's worth purging as many books as you can first, probably over a few rounds of purging. We did that over 3 moves and went from thousands of books to around 100, and now only have a very small handful of favourite cookbooks.

Zilla I did like you : cookbooks are great, and now with the iPad on the counter I'm very very happy ! And also I file digital bills, bank account reports, all the user guides of all my appliances, the plans of the appartement, archives of the works, everything usefull !

Did anyone tried this xcanex?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2p_Nt2WQE0
look amazing and easy to use.
but i cannot find much about the price...