[Ripplinger]

My best time for a scanned book (an old out of print paperback that I really wanted to read again) was 4.5 days, and working at it most of the time during that period. That included heavy editing of the cover which was in really bad shape, and a complete read through (but only 1 in this case). Depending on how well the original programs do their job in scanning, OCR and output to epub will either increase or decrease the amount of time you spend on finding and correcting errors.

In comparison, my very first old book took me months because I started out with MS Word that made a royal mess of formatting, plus I'm sure I didn't use proper settings in ABBYY at the time either. I now use Atlantis as my word processor which is much better for this purpose.

Btw, ABBYY 11 now has image editing tools included which eliminated the use of ScanTailor for me, it does a very nice job.

To put this much work into any book (without getting paid for it) pretty much requires a love of that particular book. To hire someone not in the business won't have that passion and you'll probably end up with a very poor quality epub at the end of it.