[KHS]

For my own personal use, I have a ScanSnap SV600 set up to scan two pages at once and I put a glass pane over the books to help flatten them out while scanning (this improves the results but isn't absolutely necessary). This turned out to be around 5-10x faster for me while scanning in my sheet music compared to using a flatbed scanner. There are cheaper options than the ScanSnap SV600, but I do like that the SV600 came with Adobe Acrobat, and the SV600 software handles flattening out pages, deskewing, cropping and conversion to grayscale or black and white.

As far as using the Surface Pro 7's rear camera, or another camera based solution, it really depends on the level of quality you require. If Paint.NET provides decent results after all the processing you mentioned, then this may be an acceptable solution for you. If I had to guess though, I don't think you'll find the pictures sharp enough. 

Mike

Wow, what a beautiful piece of equipment for just over $500! If my stock portfolio would stop dropping, I'd bite the bullet, knowing it could also allow me to digitize old files, research notes, snapshots, etc.. If only it had a slide attachment for photos, I'd already be all in! [Believe it or not, I've retained an old Epson SCSI scanner with slide attachment and a Power Mac G4 that handles the SCSI in the hope that I'll eventually get to all my slides--talk about slow!] Thanks for the encouragement to look for a modern solution! Have you found the built-in "book curve" corrections to be inadequate (thus the custom glass you're using)? Would clear plastic work just as well? Does it provide its own light? FWIW, I notice in the Q&A on Amazon for the latest version that it no longer bundles Adobe Acrobat but instead its own apparently proprietary software. I also note that it apparently only outputs PDF or JPG, although there was one mention of a "Do Not Compress" option. One purchaseer commented: "If I wanted people to hate my product I'd provide software like this."

For the possible benefit of other users, the results I've been getting by processing 300dpi grayscale scanned PNGs with Paint.NET are very usable and clear. I'm getting pretty quick at manually de-skewing and cleaning up the images, tightening titles, composers, copyright dates, etc., before cropping the pages, and then printing them all together @ 144dpi to one PDF (using a CutePDF custom Postscript "paper" size that matches the widest and highest dimensions of any edited image within the collection) [yes, I know MSP could do the cropping for me, but I figure the import will be much faster (and the PDF smaller) if I've already done the cropping--but I realize that MSP could reomve the excess whitespace from each .PDF page that results from my image sizes all being different]. Mike's suggestion sounds a lot faster though!