<p>David, when I first started doing this that was the method I used, but that is far more time consuming than photographing. The upside is, as you say, perfectly flat images as well as no distortion and the best lighting possible. The downside is finding a place to put the scanner where I can easily move these delicate newspapers (some are from the 1890s) around on the scanner bed without tearing them, making sure I've got the proper overlap and then in the end I still have to take the time to line up the edges in Photoshop, cut off the overlap and even out the lighting on the edges. Photography just works out better for this. The only thing I can imagine that would work out better would be a scanner or copystand that could hold A0/A1 paper and those are in the range of $10,000+.</p>