OTOH, it does make it fairly attractive for 5 or 10 or 20 students to buy one copy and have it scanned.

Yes. But you might as well get your book of some torrent site, then.

> I suspect that will prevent students from borrowing books from the library, getting them scanned via this service, and returning them.

Now I'm curious, how much does a library charge for a lost book?

Dont go down that road - please. If you "borrow" someones book you rob one person of the privilege of reading it in the future. If you pull the same stunt with a library book you potentially rob many people well into the future. For some reason libraries are very slow to replace lost books. I guess just knowing with good certainty that the book is actually gone for good rather than placed in the wrong section would be a tough nut to crack.

I wouldn't. But it's not like I'm the only person who would think of this. So, really - are lost book fines low enough to incentivize students to steal them, ship them to get scanned, and pay the fine?

Especially in the case of required textbooks.

The normal fee is the cost of the replacement and a processing fee (University of Maryland and most of the public libraries I have dealt with). When I was at the university they would accept a replacement that you bought, but still charge the processing fee to get it back on the shelf.

My alma mater charges a minimum of $40; standard books look to be $104: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/borrowing/sanctions.html

At the university library I work at its minimum $65 replacement charge depending on the actual replacement cost plus a $15 processing fee.

From my experience replacement value plus some extra fixed fee is common. So you might as well just purchase the book. That's cheaper.

It's alot quicker and less error prone to scan a stack of pages vs turning pages in a book.