Used book dealers are a strange lot. I never heard or saw of scanners, but when I worked at one we'd certainly look online for any book that we thought might b

Used book dealers are a strange lot. I never heard or saw of scanners, but when I worked at one we'd certainly look online for any book that we thought might be valuable. I think, especially at that time (2001-2004), the internet was inflating rather than devaluing used book prices in Australia. The strangest people are dealers/collectors who would spend hours of their saturday in the store, eventually buying a cheap book so they could smugly inform you, the seller, that it was a collectible edition, worth much more than they paid. Or that they would be swapping the dust jacket from this copy onto their copy, thereby improving its condition, even though this jacket was from the second printing not the first. Or dozens of other strange obscure tricks. Those are the people who don't need scanners, and presumably would resent them as a poor substitute for their encyclopedic knowledge.