How are books being scanned into e-books?

[RobertX]

I'm not looking into scanning a book as I am still relatively new to scanning, but I have always been amazed in how books are scanned and converted to electronic format.

How is this done professionally?

[BoxerLara]

Simple, buy Scanner, cheapest is 31$, but you can make handmade from old lamp(table lamp body structure as foundation) and mobile phone on top. Turn your phone into a document scanner for free.

[RobertX]

Scanner? Really? Do I really need a computer as well?

No, in all seriousness, I am aware of stuff I need to get myself off the ground.

BUT

My concern here this simple; do I need a "professional" scanner to do the scanning for me?

If I was to scan a book, would I just do so by using the common approach to scanning, or what? If I was to scan a textbook, wouldn't that just burn out the bulb in the scanner quicker?

Just a few questions that made me curious.

[RodneyYouPlonker]

I think the thing you're wanting to talk about here is usually when it comes down to the book's spine.  If you're scanning from a large book they usually have a very thick spine so it's hard going trying to take scanned images from these types of books.  I've noticed in the past you can get scanners, like you say more professional types, that will have some kind of lift system in the lid and you can always lift it above the book while scanning to allocate from the thickness of the spine and also then the book is laid down flat but also has plenty room above it where you can cover it over.

No I'm not a torrent maker that does this kind of thing so I have no experience but I have worked in things like Desktop Publishing and know a few things.  I would say a good scanner, something which has better features like what I said is a must.  Being able to lift a lid over with distance while you lay your book flat and then just going at it page by page.  May have to do things in groups like say split the scanning job into 4 sections.  Complete the first section then once all done move onto section two and so on by only taking so many pages at a time to limit how much work you do.

I don't think a cheap and simple scanner here would give you good results due to the bad design and poor adaptions that it might feature.  I'm sure there's people that work in offices that have access they might even offer to work late some nights in order to achieve these kind of methods while not having to actually purchase a scanner of such quality themselves, instead just borrow the company scanner and then store on a pen drive to take home.

[RobertX]

I'm sure a professional job would involve sophisticated equipment and expensive sums.

I'm not striving to be a professional e-book pirate, or a commercial pirate either, but, as I said, it's a curious thing, and an intriguing prospect.

My Canon can't fit a fat ass spine book so count me out.

Besides, I'm one of those who have a fetish for printed books, so I think I should stop asking.l

[rezwaki]

I'm sure a professional job would involve sophisticated equipment and expensive sums.

I'm not striving to be a professional e-book pirate, or a commercial pirate either, but, as I said, it's a curious thing, and an intriguing prospect.

My Canon can't fit a fat ass spine book so count me out.

Besides, I'm one of those who have a fetish for printed books, so I think I should stop asking.l

Well, I've had a black HP Deskjet something printer/scanner when I was scanning a comic book, hell of a time consuming task
Scanned very nicely 4K images, but I lost these, apart from this comic book scan I only scanned an old photo of my cat, this I still have , thanks to cloud drives, its in 3714x2484 24bit rgb bitmap, watching now at Deskjet pricing its pretty cheap, $80 for the modification, I assume by the look, I had (Deskjet 2755e).
Its still in my old apartment but it's very far from where I'm now

[nosnavis]

For very big books I use a semipro cam, take a high quality photo of the book as open as it can go. If you open it 90 degrees, you can move the cam for each page. then I use Scan tailor to trim the borders and deskewing, etc. I'm old, this tool is the one I've used for 15 years maybe, dunno if there are alternatives. https://scantailor.org/. Then Abbyy fine reader for the ocr.