here's a video of daniel reetz doing a talk at harvard about the home-made $300 scanning station he built, the design and plans for which he continually refined:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/03/23/daniel-reetz-on-the-why... here are the plans, now released under the g.p.l.:

http://diybookscanner.org/PDF/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-Trash-and-Che... daniel also started the d.i.y. book scanner community at:

http://www.diybookscanner.org

among other people, this community has some cool members; francesco scanned 6 italian dictionaries to put 'em online, and "postscangrinder" did 36,000 pages of high-school yearbooks. -bowerbird