And that can easily be reduced to a few minutes with a decent feed scanner and a knife if you don't care about keeping the original in easily readable condition.

this does not refute the vast majority claim that i made. the skill set involved in what you describe is, a) ridiculous, b) way more difficult than just buying another copy of the book, c) if no more copies available, who's going to destroy a book like that?, d) see a

edit: e) google and archive.com cases show this is not allowed. google just did it at such a massive scale that they were beyond the law, and archive.com didn't

Prior to the DMCA this was only a civil matter. A question of whether you were vulnerable to a lawsuit.

Now it is a federal crime to circumvent any digital copy protection measures, no matter how feeble they are. Metaphorically, if the MPAA leaves a locked door standing in nothing but a bare doorframe in the middle of an open field on their digital distribution methods, the US federal government considers it a crime to walk around that locked door.