I subscribe to Dick Eastman's daily genealogy newsletter (I don't know how folks like you and he can do things like this, but I sure appreciate that you do) and today he had an interesting bit:

It appears that the primary business of this company is newer books and magazines, but just the other day I was visiting with John Byars who remarked that he had a Texas Gazetteer from the 1890s that he would love to be able to search electronically. This sounds like a solution, but the downside is that they saw the binding off the book to allow the individual pages to be scanned. If it were my gazetteer, and if they would return the stack of original pages, I'd have to give this some serious thought.

After glancing over a couple of hundred books on my shelves, the only ones I would feel comfortable destroying in exchange for an electronic (searchable) version are the city directories, gazetteers, and Dun & Bradstreet-type business directories that I use in researching tokens. I might even go for the local and county history books I have which have no indexes. But beyond those, I'll keep my physical books, thanks.

To read the complete article, see:Scan and Digitize Your Books for $1 Each(blog.eogn.com/2014/06/29/scan-and-digitize-your-books-for-1-each/)

For more information, see:1dollarscan.com