From time to time in my work I scan books for a local publisher who will eventually turn them into ebooks.
I dismantle the book, just carefully tearing it apart -- unless it's a signed copy, then I'll use a flatbed scanner because I respect signed copies too much! this has only happened once though.
But for ordinary books I dismantle them (taking off cover, carefully tearing out pages, using scissors to take care of rough edges), and then I use an Epson GT-S80 (has a page feeder and can scan both sides of a page at once).
The scanner is talked to via a rather older version of a program called Paperport, which has a built-in OCR capability (that I think came from IBM? I don't have it on right now to check that -- Oh, TextBridge, I think). Naturally, depending on the book, the OCR can be quite good or... not.
The most recent book I'm doing has a very tiny font and while it is in English, it also has words in both Spanish and several Native Mexican languages, as well as even tinier endnote superscript number which often come out as quote marks. Whoever designed the book gave it a huge blank left margin, forcing the font to be small, I guess.
A few years ago I ran across an article on the net about making proofing easier, and they suggested using the free True Type font "DPCustomMono". This font helps the proofer know whether the OCR program has mistaken an l ("el") for a l ("one"), an Oh for a Zero, and all that. It also is a larger font by nature, so easy to read. For the book I'm doing now, I read a paragraph or two, make sure the non English words are italicized (like the book), that numbers are right and so forth, and everything is spelled right (or I point out original typos) and formatted okay. I block the paragraph(s) and use a macro attached to an icon on my tool bar (I'm using Word 2007) to turn the DPCustomMono to Times New Roman 12. If I had used TNR to begin with, I probably would miss a lot, particularly when "l" (el) is used in a date, such as 196O or l96o rather than 1900 (the book has small zeros, which confuses the OCR).
So for anyone actually proofreading, consider I suggest using "DPCustomMono" to maybe speed things up
