Very good to hear these methods, thanks guys. I can't wait to get an automatic scanner for myself like you have.
Scotty1024: could you share with us and/or me your code for rotating and cropping pages. I would like to get an Acrobat 7 but I hardly think I could write the necessary code.
Now here is my process for scanning. If you don't want to tear, cut or any other way destroy the book, you can use this. I use a 3 megapixel camera (2048 *1536 resolution, with twice the resolution of iliad, so easy to scale down by 50% to iLiad's screen). I know that you can not make use of the full screen of the iLiad, but I hope we will be able once.
OK than I need a tripod, I put the camera on it and turn it with the lenses to the ground at the book. I also used a lamp just to make really sure that autofocus works, otherwise I apply the flashlight when shooting.
So it took me 2 hours approximately to scan a 378 pages long A4 sized book that I had to bring back to the office, so cutting was not an option. After that I use a small applescript that adjusts the contrast, colors, exposure, sharpness in order to get a black and white page. It does automatically for all pages. Then I could feed the pages to an OCR software and got as good results with recognition than by using any other high resolution scanner instead of a digital camera.
Maybe its funny, but works.
