With Covid lockdowns I got a bit depressed and decided to give up my flat to travel around. When I looked at my bookshelf it broke my heart to give away/sell all my books, so I remembered the old story about Brin/Mayer (afair) at Google trying out how long it takes to photograph a book.

I did the same just with my bare hands and my smartphone with a rather short book and calculated it would take me ~2 weeks to create an imperfect (thumbs included) digitized copy of all my books. So that's what I did, eventually improving upon things:

- took a grill from the oven which stabilized the phone and relieved my arm

- created a couple of bash scripts to automate slicing and image compression

- run tesseract-ocr (fulltext search)

- ghostscript for making it a pdf All automated and improved over time. No big bang, just trial and error and tiny steps.

Meanwhile I have hundreds of books. They're not perfect but perfectly readable/searchable. Why I am telling you this? Keep it simple. Unless you're more interested in engineering the "machine" than the actual product it's supposed to create.