[bentley]

I’ve always loved physical books, and the serendipitous discoverability of volumes on a shelf can’t be beat.

That said, ebooks provide worthwhile benefits in their own right. Fulltext search, text‐to‐speech, changing fonts and font sizes, small physical size convenient for travel… other times I come up with some operation I want to perform on a particular book, like counting how often a particular phrase is used, or comparing certain passages side by side, where having an ebook copy would be useful.

So for these reasons, I often buy the ebook edition of my hardcopy books, if I can find it DRM‐free. Similarly, after reading a good ebook I’ll often get a physical copy to stash on my shelf. (In any case, though, DRM‐encumbered ebooks are off the table, at least for me!)

Makes me wish for a well‐made book scanner and OCR package, so I can format shift all those physical books I can’t find acceptable ebooks of.

[vixen99]

For me it's the absence of an affordable automated page turner that makes this conversion difficult. I have an Auramate from Czur (https://www.czur.com/) which does a pretty good job of the scanning and OCR (about 2 sec per page or double page) and corrects for curvature at the spine. However I have zero experience with other equivalent machines which are undoubtedly available.