What you need to know about digitizing hard copy books

Digitizing hard copy books is not as simple of a process as scanning regular documents. For one, you’ve got a binding or spine to deal with so it’s difficult to flatten the pages using traditional feed document scanners.

Digitizing hardcopy books

When you have archival books or collections you want to digitize, here are a few reasons to hire a professional company to digitize your hardcopy books:

High-quality scans: a professional scanning company has the best equipment made especially for digitizing hard copy books. For example at Micro Com Systems, we use an Atiz Bookdrive Pro professional scanner. The scanner has a V-shaped scanning bed to allow for less pressure on the book spine when digitizing.

A professional scanning company can ensure optimal lighting and provide image clean-up, color manipulation, and cropping as needed.

Faster: You can always hire a temp employee, or reassign a current employee to the scanning project on your in-office standard scanning equipment, but it won’t be as fast (or as high quality). When you hire a company that digitized hard copy books regularly is dedicated to your job and uses professional quality equipment to allow for faster scanning.

When it comes to image manipulation and file management after the initial scan, that can also take an inexperienced member of your staff a long time. A professional knows exactly how to color correct, and crop images quickly and efficiently.

It’s hassle-free: When you add up the costs and time to buy a professional scanner, to pay an inexperienced staff member to manually scan every page, do color corrections and cropping as needed, and correctly create a finished digital book file the costs and time add up quickly. Not to mention costs and stress to rescan pages later if the digital file isn’t the quality you require or if it’s misfiled.

Another benefit of hiring a professional company to digitize your hard copy books is that their finished scans are run through professional high-quality OCR (optical character recognition) software, so the document is now searchable and indexable.

So if you have archival bound books or any hard copy books to turn into a high-quality digitized version quickly and hassle-free, your best bet is to hire a professional company to digitize your hard copy books. You may pay a little more initially, but the peace of mind that comes with knowing your books are preserved for future generations, and available for today’s generation in a searchable digital format, is priceless.

To get a project quote and free sample scan, send us your project questionairre.