Back in the days when a lot of my favorite authors/titles weren't available as e-books, I used a service called bookscan.us and was very happy with their work. They offered several choices for the service: just a basic PDF scan, a cropped PDF scan to be bigger on an e-reader, a PDF scan with OCR, etc. I mostly used the cropped PDF scans, and was pleased with the results.
They were sometimes a little slow, but I tended to send them a big box full of used books at a time, so I understood if they didn't do it all at once.
I haven't used them for a while, since there are only a few authors/titles I want that are not in e-book now, and I already have PDF scans of almost all of them. But I don't know why their service would have changed much.
They do destroy the book in the process...
There are also a couple of other services that do the same thing that are probably pretty good too, I just haven't used them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
If it's not at Amazon, Gutenberg, Smashwords, Google books or Internet Archive*, then it's almost certainly in-copyright and not yet available as any kind of ebook. So if you do manage to find it on some random internet site, it's almost certainly a pirate copy.
In which case, a paper copy and scanning is your best bet. There are lots of companies that will (for a smallish fee) scan a book for you, although the process is usually destructive (they cut off the spine).
*Internet Archive, unfortunately, often also has unauthorised copies.
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