Looking for device to read physical books

I know I'm gonna get some negativity for this, but if you have a pair, I would recommend Meta smart glasses. Ever since they added the ability to have things described briefly or with detail, I have found that reading my snail mail on my own has been a huge blessing on my independence. You see, I am not ashamed to admit that I used to have a friend come over and read my mail to me.
There's no reason why you can't have Meta smart glasses read a physical book, be it hardcover or paperback. It's all a matter of positioning the book just right, and making sure that you are in a comfortable position. In other words, don't be hunched over a countertop, or table, and try to read a book this way. That's OK for mail, which is typically as little as a single page, and no more than five or six pages.
For a full book though, you might earn yourself a nice backache.

HTH.

I forget that you guys over there don't get the full Monty when it comes to the Meta smart glasses. I do have a question, do you have the ability to go into your Meta AI application, and go all the way over to the accessibility heading under your SmartGlass settings, and choose between brief and detailed descriptions? I have mindset to detailed, and it makes reading documents etc. far more informative.
Also, I too am saving up for the Oakley vanguards. I have been wanting a pair of wrap-around smart glasses for a while now.

Assuming you don't want to do the old college hack of chopping the spine off the book and dumping the pages in a sheet fed scanner... A document camera may be your best bet? Ipevo is one such brand, there are many now. They are essentially cameras on a stand so the camera is held overhead.

You could always get a flatbed scanner and use your computer.

If you do this, you’ll have a few options. I know that some scanners now come with software that will OCR What you read. If you’re a JAWS user, you can use their OCR. If you’re an NVDA user, I’m sure they have an OCR add on. I am certified in NVDA, but I don’t use it often enough to know if they do. I should look that up. If you’re a Mac or Windows user, you could buy Abby Fine Reader. Finally, I don’t know of anyone who has used this program since it belonged to Serotec, but there is Docuscan+ https://pneumasolutions.com/docuscan/ is the URL.

The echo vision glasses by agiga seem like a valuable purchase. They are built with the visually impaired and blind in mind. And there’s plenty of videos of them scanning and quickly reading a page out of a book. They are just about to be released.

Take a chance on them see how it goes.

Also, I don’t understand what the following means. “ I also feel that a book unread is a stupid book... Or the person who bought it is stupid... Or something.”

Best of luck to you on your journey, Oliver. Personally, I am happy with Kindle and Audible, and similar forms of media for book consumption. If I did not have near senseless fingertips, I would go back to Braille for books...
Oh, and hey, if you do decide on the Echo Vision, do let us know how those work out for you. 😎

One thing you might consider is that supposedly in their next update, JAWS users are going to have access to the Microsoft natural voices. I daren't guess how many or if there will be any limitations, but one option you might could try is to use Bookshare and let JAWS and Microsoft do the reading for you. Yeah, yeah, I know, physical media and all. But I am just throwing that option out there. And speaking of, I know that Bookshare has an Alexa skill. I can't speak to the quality of the voices, but if you have an Alexa speaker, that might be somethign to think about. Oh, and that gives me a really evil idea. ... I wonder if I could get Eloquence to activate Alexa. Just the weird ideas my mind conjures. Sometimes I scare myself.

Good luck, Sir Oliver.

As far as frictionless goes--well, less frictional, let's say--we're not at all far off from OCR via chatbots or agents. Microsoft used to allow uploading pdfs to copilot, which was the only time I could actually accurately know what was in the tables on my utility bill. Last time I tried it, the PDF wasn't an upload option. The ABBY Fine Reader Engine now uses an LLM, so other paid agent subscriptions might already be a great companion to an iphone camera stand. I think only A.I. can be virtually 100% accurate. I have hundreds upon hundreds of books I scanned using various OCR programs over the years, and I would never read fiction through those, and there's plenty of garbled text, even at 99% accuracy, so no book was what I would call enjoyable. Of course, they were academic literature, so they're not meant to be enjoyed.

I would say that the Meta glasses no matter what comes out are not really worthwhile. They don’t really do a good job. Echo vision seems like it’s working towards really benefiting the blind community. I don’t know that it’ll be outdated anytime soon. I do think that sometime late next year into early 2027, we will probably get a sense of what the Apple glasses are going to be like and that might be interesting. Some people like the envision glasses that are coming out. I’m not crazy about them. I do think the Google glasses using Google XR could be interesting though

This thing is still on sale as far as I know, and hopefully unlike openbook it's aged better.
I haven't heard any review about it yet, good or bad.
@Brian: I was the same, but since kindle actively fights against local copies of book, and audible according to my gut feeling will probably start doing the same sooner or later, I avoid them as much as possible now.
Only in the US do we have drm even on nls content, elsewhere it's not protected or way less agressive like bookshare, and through abcglobalbooks we can thus access a ton of content.

This is purely my opinion regarding the upcoming Apple glasses. My guess is that they will be more expensive than most, of not all, of the glasses previously mentioned in this post. The reason? They have the Apple brand name. No real point to this post; just jotting down my thoughts.

It's decent, the motion detection is good and it recognizes pretty well. That's particularly true if you do stuff with larger books, e.g. scan a page at a time, scan then slide the book over, and mask the opposite page with a blank sheet of paper.

That having been said, it only works on Windows, and though there's a driver to make it work with other stuff, e.g. KNFB Reader or whatever it's called now, I never did get it to work with anything other than Openbook.

However, there are scanning stands for your phone that will essentially turn it into an overhead camera. This is the one I know about, but I can dig up a thing with more after supper.

https://www.scanjig.com/

So pair that with a decent scanning app, something like VD Scan, probably not one of the free AIs, and you can use your phone like an overhead document camera like the PEARL.

Here's a list.

https://www.turner42.com/ScanningStands.html

Here's one from the Braille Bookstore.

http://www.braillebookstore.com/Mobile-Phone-Scanning-Stand.1

Finally, there's this one, but their site isn't working now, even though it did like a minute ago.

https://en.ceciaa.com/scanbox-vision.html

For scanning books, you'll want somebody to take a look at it and make sure it either doesn't have sides on the right and left, or that it's big enough to scan any books you'll want to use it with. I know I have some hardcovers that are pretty wide.

The PEARL sits on this sort of triangular base plate and then has an arm that sticks forward with the camera at the end, so it's all open. Some of these stands sound like they're enclosed boxes, which means only certain books will fit in them.

Please note I've never used one of these to scan a book. They're pretty cheap though, so if you have scanning software for your phone that will do batch scanning, two pages at once, and possibly motion detection so you don't have to keep tapping the phone, it might be a cheap thing to try before worrying about getting a document camera to hook up a desktop with whatever scanning software you've got.