Scanning with your phone is getting easier. At a minimum you can take a pic of each of the pages. Software can clean up the images, sorta. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing.
I remember when "cammed" books were bottom-tier and basically limited to things like 0day releases, even when done with an expensive DSLR. It's amazing how much camera technology has progressed since then; in less than a second you can get a high-resolution, extremely readable image of each page.
I used to participate in the "bookz scene", well over a decade ago. Raiding the local public libraries --- borrowing as many books as we could --- and having "scanparties" to digitise and upload them was incredibly fun, and we did it for the thrill, never thinking that one day almost all of our releases would end up in LibGen.
