I once asked a special collections librarian in the US to scan a rare book. This is a perfectly normal, common practice in some libraries; for example, I've go

I once asked a special collections librarian in the US to scan a rare book. This is a perfectly normal, common practice in some libraries; for example, I've gotten scans of rare books in a library in Salzburg e-mailed to me for something like twenty euros. This one librarian, however, hadn't heard of that, and the only method he could think of to do it was the one you suggest—slicing the spine and running the pages through a multi-page scanner, and he was horrified at the idea. A long and frustrating conversation ensued as I tried to convince him that I was not trying to get him to destroy rare books in order to digitize them.