title_body: What is the best way to scan paper books to digital ebooks? To make a long story short, me and my daughter have ALOT of paper books, and we would like to find a app that would let us "scan" the book in a digital format that can be used with my Kindle Fire, so we are not forced to haul around the actual book. Any suggestions?
upvoted_answer: It's probably not relevant to you at this point, but a service called Shelfie used to allow you to purchase heavily discounted digital versions of any physical book you already owned. You had to sign the title page and upload a photograph of it as evidence you owned it. 
  
  Very clever idea and addressed a need all of us have, but unfortunately the interface was cumbersome, some of the discounts were not that good and many publishers didn't jump on board to participate. 
  
  Unfortunately in January 2017 the company stopped offering this service and was sold to Kobo. (See this article: https://teleread.org/2017/01/31/shelfie-goes-out-of-business-tonight/ )  My guess is that at some point another company will offer this service, hopefully with more participation from publishers and more buy in from Amazon and other distributors. Even though this company did not exactly succeed, it acknowledged an urgent consumer need and I fully expect somebody to try it again. 
  
  As far as scanning the books manually and legally, that seems like a lot of wasted effort.
  
  Even if you wanted to pirate ebooks (under the rationale that you already paid for the book once), it still isn't particularly easy to track down ebooks which aren't bestsellers (Harry Potter, etc). 
  
  The thing to keep in mind though is that often used copies of printed books are still much cheaper than digital versions, and that some books haven't even been digitalized yet. 
  
  Sometimes publishers can offer temporary price reductions for well-known ebooks (especially when they advertise on bookbub. Occasionally these titles can get as low as 99 cents or 1.99.  As a practical matter, it might be a good idea to set price alerts for books you want digital versions of. You can use a service like ereaderiq to do that.