Anyone that knows a good scanner or a guide for DYI project?

I'm so bloody tired of reading big books for university studies I thought it might be rational to try and find some scanning tool / system that would finalize the pages/books into PDFs that I then can use on my Nexus 7 and future e-reader.

I vaguely recall every book stating you're not allowed to make copies of it, but if you are going to do it get a scanner with a sheet feeder and remove the pages from the cover and spine.
Unfortunately I don't actually know much about scanners, but you can always do a little Googling and find guides.
If you want to OCR, I don't really know what software is the best at the moment but again people will have written plenty on the subject so that shouldn't be too hard to find.
I haven't done it in a while, but several years back OCR was still pretty bad.
I you're really into it you should find some of the book and comic scanning groups out there, I used to chat with them back in the day and I remember them having a lot of tips for newbies :P

I know about copyrights but I won't share them and I'll encrypt them all so it won't accidentally leak. Besides, is it actually illegal to scan them for yourself or is sharing the issue? (or even both?)

OCR is necessary for text searching and that is important because I'll save my books in case I need to look things up, that is annoying as hell to keep track of normal books (IMO). It's slow but I believe it works. As long as I can rationalize the process time shouldn't be an issue.

I'll search for those book and comic scanning groups but in case you remember any sources please provide them.

While not what you wanted, a number of Pearson books can be purchased as digital editions and read through an e-reader application they provide. You may want to look into that.

If you do want to scan books, make sure you have a high res camera.

For every new course I'll look into those options but in cases I can't purchase or lend them digitally I want a back up plan.

I have no idea, I just read a lot and think I've seen that in every book I've ever read.
I assume it's mostly the sharing they don't like and these days they probably also want to charge you extra for a digital copy :P I have no idea what the state of OCR is these days, but back in the day I had to 'teach' the software how to read the font for every book and of course it still made mistakes. If done correctly it is much much better of course since you can select text, search the document and the file is smaller because text takes up less space than images.
Unfortunately all of my sources are gone, I actually tried them all six months ago but I think something like 99% were gone and the 1% that was left was abandoned by all the people I knew.
They used to hang out on DC++ a lot, but either the channels changed or they went back to IRC or something.

I don't think it is worth the bother to be honest. Either buy electronic copies, which you can bind yourself if you want to, or search around on the internet for PDFs or DJVUs of the books. I can't give links unfortunately :P but there are places. If you are talking about the big books typically used in undergrad calculus, physics or chemistry then those should be especially easy to find.

this

I found this: DYI Book Scanner KIT

$495.

I'm seriously considering something like this. I'm going to do some more research first.

Check on Instructables, there are a bunch of projects related to this.

Here's one http://www.instructables.com/id/Bargain-Price-Book-Scanner-From-A-Cardboard-Box/

I would prefer a more professional design, I rather spend money to get something almost out-of-the-box working and I don't see myself wanting to flip the sides manually.

http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-Trash-and-Cheap-C/

Just do a search and I'm sure you'll find every option from the dirt cheap one I first posted to a crazy awesome one from DIY Book Scanner.

Thanks, that's something more like what I'm looking for.

Still the problem there is the OCR part, These scans are in pdfs from images, no texts. You could check if there is an E-Book or pdf edition of your book. Cheaper and better than selfmade scans, especially when formulas are in there.