Having done a lot of scanning in the past, no matter how gentle you are, the book will be damaged; at least a little bit. Even if you do it manually, by hand, really slowly.
It’s the unfortunate reality, because books are not designed to be held open and pressed flat onto an unyielding surface. If you don’t press flat, you’ll get curved pages and bad quality (dark) images, which is sometimes ok and fixable by software, but often not. You can get really fancy expensive machines, but they still don’t fully solve the problem.
I did scanlation editing stuff for a while, and half my job was making the raw page scans look presentable, because the scanners didn’t want to destroy their manga (understandable).
This matches my experience. My college archive digitizes a few yearbooks a year (for whatever classes are having as big reunion) and it’s a pain. For modern yearbooks (70s and later) we have a dozen or more copies, so we take one apart and feed it through the feed scanner, which works well. We then store the loose pages in a folder, in case we need to rescan anything.
Older yearbooks (where we don’t have so many copies) we use the flatbed scanner and the pages come out warped, so we hand fix each page in Photoshop.
Yeah that’s true of Google as well I believe. I think Archive is more careful, but I’m sure some books get damaged in the process there as well.
Having done a lot of scanning in the past, no matter how gentle you are, the book will be damaged; at least a little bit. Even if you do it manually, by hand, really slowly.
It’s the unfortunate reality, because books are not designed to be held open and pressed flat onto an unyielding surface. If you don’t press flat, you’ll get curved pages and bad quality (dark) images, which is sometimes ok and fixable by software, but often not. You can get really fancy expensive machines, but they still don’t fully solve the problem.
I did scanlation editing stuff for a while, and half my job was making the raw page scans look presentable, because the scanners didn’t want to destroy their manga (understandable).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning#Methods
This matches my experience. My college archive digitizes a few yearbooks a year (for whatever classes are having as big reunion) and it’s a pain. For modern yearbooks (70s and later) we have a dozen or more copies, so we take one apart and feed it through the feed scanner, which works well. We then store the loose pages in a folder, in case we need to rescan anything.
Older yearbooks (where we don’t have so many copies) we use the flatbed scanner and the pages come out warped, so we hand fix each page in Photoshop.