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Digitization and OCRing of books, without doing any damage to the book is a fairly simple process.
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Probably, but it also requires equipment purchases and a learning curve. I tried it already with my printer/scanner. It works fine for scanning craft books, but not so good for novels. Just way too many errors, so I decided to go the professional route with a place that a Mobilereads member recommended. I have only about 10 books to be OCR'd.
I'm paying $15 for 3 books to be OCR'd and searchable, two hard covers and a paperback with tiny print. I've another few days to wait until they are done. If the results are as I hope, I might even be able to convert to epub or mobi and fix the formatting myself. If not, at least I can read them on my tablet. BUT, reading it at all is the current goal. I feel a little bad, as mentioned, because the books are destroyed in the process, but I would have gotten rid of them anyway, since I was unable to read them.
Let me explain the problem with craft books vs. novels. Craft (and most cookbooks) use fonts that have a fair amount of space between the letters. Novels often have the letters quite scrunched together. I have an issue with ghosting, where I get offset images of the letters. With the spacing, it's a nonproblem. If there is no space, they all get jumbled together. So, just making it bigger doesn't really help all that much, although it can. My goal is to be able to covert to epub or mobi, where I can manipulate the font to something that is far easier for me.