Storing paper books can be very cumbersome, especially if you have a large collection. Obviously, large book collections take up a lot of office space, and no matter how sophisticated your storage facility may be, there’s no way to guarantee that your books won’t succumb to wear or get damaged.
What’s more, finding specific pages or documents within a large book collection can take a very long time. Converting books to PDF files can solve these problems and more.
But how can you convert your books to PDF files? And what are the benefits of professional book scanning when compared to doing it yourself?
Going through and digitizing books containing records, documents, historical texts, lab notebooks or manuals can seem like a daunting task, especially for organizations that don’t have enough resources as it is.
However, there are methods for book and large format document scanning that can help you get on track to convert all of your books to digital format.
Here are a few things you could try to get started.
SCAN A BOOK USING A MOBILE DEVICE
The simplest way to scan book pages and turn them into a digital file is by using your mobile device. Today, there are plenty of free apps that allow you to scan the book page by page and then collect it into a single digital file.
This process can work great if you just need to share a few dozen pages with your colleagues – in a few minutes, you can have a ready to send digital file instead of having to do everything with a physical scanner.
However, this method has its limitations.
For one thing, imagine scanning books to PDF when you have to go through dozens or even hundreds or large books. Flipping through page after page and scanning with your mobile device each time will get boring quickly, and the entire project might take weeks of rigorous, boring, and tiring work to complete.
No one can be expected to take this much time scanning their books, and you would find yourself looking for how to scan a book to PDF approaches that are less demanding before you even got through the first one.
Sure, this method can work if you don’t need too many pages (or you have an endless number of hours to waste), but for most people, it just won’t work.
And that’s not even considering that the quality of this approach won’t be great, either. Scanning with your phone’s camera won’t reproduce the detail of the pages very well, so the text and the images won’t be very zoomable, becoming blurry whenever you try to get a bit more detail.
So, while it’s cool that our phones can serve as scanners, it’s definitely not the best way to scan a book to PDF. Let’s look at some of the other options that you might want to consider.
DE-BINDING A BOOK FOR SCANNING
If you have a multi-function printer in your office, it could technically be used to scan your books and save you the trouble of having to purchase specialized book scanning equipment. The only problem is, this method will require you to cut or unbind the books so that the pages can lay flat on a scanning bed or be sheet fed.
For this method, you will need to carefully remove the bindings on each book and remove the pages without damaging them. Then, once you have de-bound a book and have it in separate pages, you can simply use your scanner as you would when scanning a document.
Obviously, this process will take a lot of time since you’ll need to do everything manually, page by page, but it will at least produce higher-quality images than using your phone.
Once you have each page scanned, you’ll need to crop and edit the scans to ensure that they’re consistent and then use software to sequence them into a single PDF file.
If you have dozens or even hundreds of books that need to be digitized, this process can take a very long time, so it’s not really recommended unless you only need to scan a few books.
Just as with the phone method, you would have to spend multiple days or even weeks when digitizing your book collection, with the added time that would be wasted by having to de-bind the books before scanning them.
The fact remains that without a specialized scanner, doing your own book scans becomes very problematic and not something that most people would be willing to go through just because of the time commitment that it would involve.
And with this method, you would also have to deal with the fact that your books would likely be ruined after you scan them. Even if you don’t plan on using them again, this is pretty wasteful and not something that most people would want to do.
Because of that, there’s only one method that really makes sense if you want to enjoy the benefits of having a digital book collection without having to waste so much time doing everything on your own.
USE PROFESSIONAL DOCUMENT SCANNING SERVICES
For large-scale projects, the hands-down best option is to hire professionals that specialize in digitizing books. There are countless benefits of professional book scanning which you couldn’t get any other way, at least not without investing thousands of dollars into equipment that you would probably end up using only once or twice.
For one thing, they have the equipment and the expertise necessary to scan hundreds of books in a reasonable amount of time while ensuring that the digitized version of the books is of good quality and that your printed books remain intact.
Scanning services providers have specialized book scanners that allow them to scan a book to PDF without damaging them and without losing any quality. These book scanners use specially-designed V-shaped cradles and a high-quality camera to capture each image from above while making corrections to the images to account for the curvature of the book’s spine.
Some book scanning service providers even have automatic page-turning scanners, which utilize a robotic suction arm to turn each page, eliminating the need to manually handle the books. This is especially important when dealing with fragile texts.
And then you have the quality aspect, which also cannot be overstated. The PDF files that you’ll get will be high-resolution and crisp quality, which means that you can zoom in and look at the files in whatever magnification that you need.
These types of services are becoming more affordable and more accessible each year, so no matter what size project you might have, reaching out and consulting with a professional will always give you the best insights about how to proceed in your situation.