My father lost a great deal of his physical books in a flood. If they were bits, he wouldn't have.
I can't ask my dad anything anymore as he has Alzheimer's, but he had given me his book collection and I've been scanning them, too. (Of course I don't cut up the sentimental treasures, but there are only a handful of those.)
Also, years ago, he got low vision and couldn't read comfortably anymore. If it was today, I would set up a projector to throw the pdf pages on the wall so he could keep reading.
I buy the physical book, cut the back off, scan it to a pdf and throw the book into the recycling bin.
On the book scanning note though, do you have a special book scanner? I've never seen one outside of professional shops and turning the pages seems like a ginormous hassle.
I use a Fujitsu fi-5120C hopper-fed scanner (does both sides at once) and a QCM-8200M stack slicer. Those make short work of most books. The Fujitsu scanner software includes an OCR. I scan at 400dpi. If a page gets messed up, I use pdftk to merge in corrected scans.
I also use it to scan in small mountains of old tax records and documents I had stuffed everywhere.
The odd thing is I've come to prefer the pdf images, as they look like a book page (!). This works out great on ereaders with larger screens like the Kindle DX, or the Kobo Aura which has an HD eink display.
The regular Kindle is a bit squinty with a paperback sized PDF, but I bought some dimestore reading glasses which helps wit dat.