Realistically, crowdfunding purchase and scanning of the material was exactly what we have been doing
with the doujin releases for the last 2-3 years. Course KM went and pissed off people, so that’s no longer a thing.
If someone were serious enough, and you could get enough money together, then the most straight forward method
would be to use my contact that scans whole books on the cheap, mainly because he’s doing it as an archivist, not to
get rich. You’d have to essentially buy a copy of everything for the sake of being scanned and destroyed. Also realistically, it makes more sense as a pay-as-you-go system, progressively getting more books (except in the case of cheaper lots and heavy stuff ie. shipping, as that’s a large expense). It would also be wise to have some kind of vote in place that says people are more likely to donate in order to get the next book, if it’s one they are interested in. So majority wins for the next thing to be bought and digitized.
A single person or several people agree to group buy, we find a item listing that is agreeable, I buy it and get it shipped in, I scan it and send the scans off to Dagon typically, they get put up while someone translates the afterward. Someone is the recipient of the physical doujins.
There is an entity that will scan things for cheap and good quality, but your book will be cut apart and there’s a substantial fee if you want the loose pages returned.
Beyond that, you either have to build a book scanner (about $350 + cameras), or use a wand scanner (crappy and repetitive).
Destroying a book is the fastest sure way of doing things. But as mentioned, for a lot of us we’ve paid a small fortune to
get what we have. We’d rather stab ourselves than our collections.
