Hi Lang
Thanks for the test shots, interesting information.
Understand that this is something you are doing in your spare time, and spare time for most of us is a scares commodity so as you can is well understood.
As the books are a non standard size and hard to scan, hate to see you have to take the books apart. How about just shooting pictures of the pages with digital camera instead. Try one page of text and see if that is easier and quicker.
Test photo of 8.5X11 inch GM Product Review Magazine 1942 shot hand held natural light down sized from 3MB to 991KB to upload to MLU.
PS. Just realized should have converted to Mono or Black and White image but you get the idea.
Thanks again for the effort
Cheers Phil