I suppose that there are a lot of people that need various books, magazines,etc. digitized by retyping, as opposed to just scanning them and I don’t mind spending hours (re)typing words, so it would be a great job for me, the problem is that I don’t know where to look for jobs like that exactly.
That work is only for old publications, because new publications are digital already. And among the old publications, most of them have already been either automatically digitized by big companies like Google, or typed by hand by volunteers for Project Gutenberg or similar organization.
If you really want this exact type of job, the best way would probably be to be hired by a particular individual who needs some very specialized/odd work done for their own use.
That kind of job is getting scarce. Scanning and OCR is getting so good that, with a minimum of editing, pages can be prepared accurately. Big difference from OCR of 20 years ago.
Heck, even the post office’s scanners can read cursive addresses on letters enough to route them without human intervention.
Just about any service you can think of is available on fiverr.com . A quick visit and search shows that just two people are offering book to text scanning services (both are not in the US), so you may try offering your service there to get a feel for the market.
They don’t specify a rate (though almost all services starts at $5), but for comparison, Chinese, Japanese or Korean translations (from characters to English) typically run $5 per 250-300 characters (roughly 50-100 English words).
The gotcha for a seller are revisions, usually satisfaction guaranteed. Shouldn’t be a major issue for you if you’re copying only English.
I just checked the Proofreading & Editing section there’s a lot more sellers there, the going rate is $5 for 1000 to 3000 words (electronic or paper). You could possibly add on $5 for X pages scanned, though shipping costs for anything non-local will break the already slim profit margin.
Note, the “real” money comes with additional words that are sold at a higher rate than the intro.