If you have more paper books than ebooks for your new ebook reader, and want to find the easiest way to get text from the one to the other, a friend and I have started bkrpr.org as a place for people to share experiences and tools for converting their books into a digital form.
Currently we have a design, and video of the design actually in use, for a non-destructive camera mount/book stand that allows you to photograph your books quickly and pretty effectively. I'm getting something between 600-1000 pages an hour with it depending on the actual book used. Resulting images and OCR (using the free tesseract program) are available here:
http://bkrpr.org/doku.php?id=results. The whole device is built from ~$65 USD in parts with the addition of two ~$100 USD consumer cameras. If you already have a camera or two they should work just fine, though some features will make things faster.
We are also building free software for picture processing, so you don't have to rotate and crop all the pictures manually. Version 0.1 is out today and can do rotate and crop pretty well. If you want to see some examples of the before and after images, we've got a flickr stream with real samples here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bkrpr/s...7613057232393/. We will also be adding some functionality for OCR and PDF generation as we develop further.
Currently the software is linux only, but it is all done in python and others are welcome to come along and help move this to all operating systems. Windows and OS X compatibility is the main target for the 0.2 release and the device for taking the pictures doesn't rely on your computer at all, so you can use it to digitize regardless of what operating system you use.
We've got some other device designs in the works, and would love to hear what people are doing with their own books. Anyone who is interested should come over and take a look. Comment here or there, wherever works for you.