Ah, baloney. If you can open the book, you can photograph it with your iphone. You'll find the result answers your concerns. Try it with any of your books.
That reminds me, I have an out-of-copyright book by a namesake where I took the photos years ago — before I had a smartphone let alone one with built-in OCR — and still have not gotten around to transferring the text to wiki… source? wikibooks? One of them.
I should do that.