Why Is It Important To Go For Non-Destructive Book Scanning?

Alana Alison
6 min readAug 12, 2021
Non-Destructive Book Scanning Service

The scanning and digitization can help organizations and publishers to preserve book archives cost-effectively. In addition, the copyrights of the books can be preserved with a high-quality scan.

However, digitizing books at scale consumes time and money and if the process is not well-thought-out or hastily started, it could impact the results.

Successful digitization of books at scale requires specialized knowledge, special software, and specifically designed scanners.

Professional book digitizing service providers use trained technicians to ensure high levels of digitization at each stage. After the scan, file indexing and management also matter.

In the process of hiring an agency, you might be looking for the answers to these questions:

  • How is non-destructive scanning of books better?
  • How do you scan old and fragile books?
  • How do we scan images and books and store them in different file formats?
  • How does a non-destructive book scanner work?

The post is aimed to answer these questions and help you in digitizing and scanning your books without hassles.

Why is it Important to go for Non-Destructive Book Scan?

non-destructive book scanning

Deciding to go for “ Non- Destructive Book Scanning” is a big decision for a company, publisher, or library owner. It offers many benefits to expand your business but a heavy investment is required for it.

But if you are having valuable historical data that needs to be preserved, digitization of the same without damaging is the need of the hour.

Non-destructive book scanning is used when it is desirable to preserve the original text for historical purposes or when the original text is valuable.

Also Read: Digitizing Historical Documents In 2021

Here are some types of documents that require non-destructive book scanning

  • Large historical documents
  • Old textbooks
  • Government books
  • Large Manuals
  • Newspapers/Research Papers

Non-destructive Book Scanning requires specialized equipment that can image each page without destroying the bookbinding. This technique preserves the information in digital format for easy access and searchability, while also preserving the physical book.

Some of the benefits of a non-destructive book scan are :

The major benefit is that if the book is bound well and under 1.5″ in thickness, the book will be intact after the scan.

  • The process is faster and requires less effort.
  • Cost-effective method for scanning books without damaging
  • Since high-quality scanners are used, fragile and damaged books can be scanned and edited easily.

How can I preserve historic data and important information?

Non-destructive book conversion is a viable method to preserve historic data and important information. A high-resolution planetary scanner is used for this purpose. It can be either a manual commercial book scanner or even a robotic book scanner.

While it is possible to use a multifunction device and go page by page, you still risk overstretching the book when scanning it. To do so, some precautionary measures must be considered:

  • The condition of the book matters. If the desired book fits the scanner you use, go ahead and lay the bound book on the book cradles, face up. But if the book has poor binding then first your need to bind it well.
  • The thickness of the book should be within 3CM. If it is bigger than this then you need to make prior arrangements to reduce thickness.
  • Any high-quality non-destructive book scanner can handle the scan of a maximum of 10 books. After that, it needs a break. It’s a practical restriction that you must consider while setting a time frame.
  • Another aspect to maintain the authenticity of the historic data is to go for color scanning. It will preserve the original essence of the document.
  • Keeping these precautions in mind, you can go ahead with the book scanning process.

What File Formats Should I Use For Non-destructive Scanning?

When you decide to opt for the scanning and digitization of books, maintaining the soft copies and choosing the appropriate file format is equally important. The process is carried by the company which you hire for scanning but in the long run, you must know file formats.

First of all, after the scan, the books or other documents are stored in a raster format, Jpeg or Tiff in most cases. After that, the images are edited and converted into high-quality docs.

A standard format for boom scan is PDF. PDF/A is used for archiving or PDF searchable with OCR for books. The other file formats available are word, RTF, and other TXT file formats. These are great when you want to do further editing on these files.

After that, we can see the famous ebook format. This can be an Epub, kindle nook, and lately audiobook, mp3, or other sound-based file formats.

To digitize your books into a fine quality ebook format successfully, you will have to take initiative and ask the scanning company to fine-tune them to get the most out of the scanning and digitization of your bound documents.

How can eRecordsUSA help in digitizing and scanning my books?

Document & book Scanning Service

While you are going to approach a professional book scanning company in San Francisco, CA. you must be searching for an option that can deliver the optimal solution.

Some of the aspects that you must look at are the availability of book scanners and the experience the company has in dealing with book scanning and historic data scanning specifically.

The good part: eRecordsUSA offers unparalleled service for book scanning without damaging the spine. We keep the original binding intact successfully providing he digital copy of the book

Accuracy, security, and preservation are our main goals while dealing with every book scanning project.

If you are looking for the digitization of books on a large scale, then eRecordsUSA is an affordable option. We provide efficient fragile and old book scanning services so that you can convert your book archive into a digital ebooks collection.

We provide practical solutions for scanning your legacy records!

Our Specialization:

We have experience in handling damaged and old books by:

  • Providing easy retrieval using software tools (images and text both)
  • Fine-tuning the quality of scanned books by adjusting grayscale and color resolution
  • Handling large projects within a time frame and in a hassle-free environment

Conclusion:

As new techniques and better scanning facilities are emerging, the digitization of books, old records, and important information has emerged as a new trend.

Many educational and non-educational institutes are working hard to eliminate on-site infrastructure expenses and leverage cloud services for storing their valuable data.

With this option, host your digital records in a data center and be free from the tensions of preserving the books. Moreover, you can keep your books handy and in a sharable and searchable mode.

Choose the right service like ours, and get the benefits of non-destructive book scanning!

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Alana Alison

I am Alana, Social Entrepreneur, Activist, and Writer/Editor. With Clarity that Gratitude and Decency Truly Matter.