Here is a quick overview of the time involved getting a paper copy of a book into a workable, decent PDF, using a DSLR camera.
- Making the pictures went super fast. In a mere 26 minutes I managed to snap 349 photos, or slightly less than 700 pages.
- It took me 10 minutes to transfer them to my computer.
- I then spent about 35 minutes rotating and cropping them.
- It then took Scan Tailor 2 hours and 10 minutes to process the photos.
- Lastly I had to stitch them together in Adobe, which costed me about 15 minutes.
This makes for a total of 3 hours and 36 minutes. This comes down to about 35 seconds per photo (2 pages). For the standard method (using a Xerox/OCÉ copier) I once measured about 20 seconds per photo (2 pages). This method is therefore about 1.75 slower. The speed of only the photos comes down to about 4.5 seconds per photo (2 pages), or about 1.67 times faster than the standard method.
For most purposes, the standard method is much better.
The Digital Orientalist 
Why would you waste time on manually rotating and cropping them? This can either be automated through scripts, a Photoshop workflow etc. or it can be done inside ScanTailor, which you are using anyway.
Point taken. Of Photoshop workflows I know nothing so maybe it is faster. I’d be happy to know more. I chose Resize Sense, as it allows for an in between strategy of manual and batch function. You manually adjust the area and then it performs that action on all the images. I did it this way for more direct control over the process. When I did not do it, ScanTailor was sometimes not recognizing the correct area of the text and it had to be manually adjusted for a lot of pages.