I bought a PlusTek OpticBook 3600 book scanner. Not as fast as the “Nimbus 2000” (heh-heh!) but it works okay for me. It’s just a regular scanner except that the glass goes right to the edge so you can hang the book over the edge and avoid the spine distortion you often see. It does take takes a lot of time to scan more than a few pages and my OCR does not do Japanese or Chinese. It does a do a good job on Dutch, Spanish and French so far though. When I convert the files to pdf’s they look just like a professionally made e-book. I’m not entirely sure but I think you are allowed to have a copy of a book you own, or at least some part of it, for research and educational purposes, but then, I’m not an expert on that stuff.
SkyBlueteapot, please let me know if you are still doing this. I did not get any response to my email to you so I am not sure if you are still pursuing this.
You didn’t get my e-mail? Ah. It seems I didn’t send one. I’m terribly sorry, I must have had a Mum moment there. I have sent one now. I shall find out what Instant Messenger is and report back.