I use Open Camera. Quality ultimately depends on the camera.
BUT my 2002 vintage flatbed scanner with optional ADF is close to 30 M pixels at 600 dpi for a larger book. The advantage of a camera is a V shaped holder to avoid damaging the spine. Pirates and professional scanning of cheap common books cut off the spine and use a duplex ADF.
Obviously if the camera has a good lens, the page size is A5 or smaller or a V support is needed then the camera wins on DPI if it's a decent resolution.
Very even lighting is needed. Skinny florescent tubes and a diffuser as on older light boxes are good. LED sources may need to be further away. Glass or plastic to hold pages flat is needed if not using a scanner.
All the problems solved nearly 50 years ago!
Quote:
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In 1974, Ray Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions such as Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976
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Google uses a camera and the V shaped book holder. However much of their output is only good enough for "Search" and thus poor quality. A lot is on the Internet Archive and all of it as search results in Google Books. They don't bother with proofing. They also ought to have lost the court case because they are scanning and storing complete copyright works without the copyright holder's permission.
In 2000 a really good copy typist rather than Scan + OCR + human proof read/edit was still cheaper a for a quality transcription. Such people are now rare.
I stopped printing to paper or proofing on PC screen nearly seven years ago. I make an ebook and proof correct on that (was Kindle now Kobo) and read back the annotations.