How could you use your digital camera to digitize and scan text?

Including doing OCR on them?

I am a student trying to save money on copies you need from a
libraries. (Aren't digicams expensive enough already?)

Sometimes papers are not that good anyway and you only need sections
of them.

I know there are ways to tell an OCR software to read a file from the
file system, but I haven't found an end-to-end, comprehensive
explanation about how to do this, and AFAIK there is no web site that
consistantly lists features in comparison charts

Most hits I found after googling for it were about using cameras
primarily to take pictures, which might be not the case for the large
amount of students that would basically use them as scanners.

I tech monkey I know was telling me about high res imaging cameras,
which come with a PCI card to plug into a PC so that 'you get what you
see' functionality which is useful for running the OCR right and keep
working at the same time.

Could you explain to me at least your experience with such things?

What are the involved issues?

I guess all cameras are not created equal. Which ones are best for
text scanning? Those best for B&W Mode or gray scale?

I think this is pretty much doable with current commercial gadgets,
but I just don't know how.