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btrettel comments on LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Document delivery services can provide scans. However, there probably aren't any legal services which'll scan entire books for you due to copyright law. I have a hard time getting different interlibrary loan departments to get me scans of some smaller documents as well, even if you can verify the documents are in the public domain.
The easiest thing in this case would be to use a good scanner in a library. I'm fond of the overhead ones.
I keep a list of certain rare books and articles that can be found in particular libraries, and go scan a bunch of them in batches when I have the opportunity. Yesterday I visited the Library of Congress and scanned a fair number of things which could not be found elsewhere.
Edit: I assumed above that gwern does not have a copy. Vaniver in reply to me gives a good option if gwern does have a copy.
Huh; my friend converted his physical collection to a digital one years ago, and I thought he said the price was dollars per book. (Googling "physical book to ebook" gives a lot of options.) The thing I would be more concerned about is it being an image file or terrible OCR.
This is good to know. I was not aware of services which will scan books you own. I think this is the route gwern should go.
My own experience with OCR is that it's generally pretty bad unless it's done by Google and/or you put a lot of effort into cleaning the images. Though, I have only used free services, so perhaps my experience is limited.
I was thinking that if there were no digital editions yet, I could perhaps buy a used copy and either debind (for flat pages) & scan it myself or use one of the services like 1DollarScan. The problem with the latter is that I don't know how well it would work with a math book, and some of them won't return the debound pages to you...