I worked for a company that scanned and catalogued many books in the ‘00s. There’s two primary challenges to solve, nondestructive scanning and speed. 1. In or

I worked for a company that scanned and catalogued many books in the ‘00s. There’s two primary challenges to solve, nondestructive scanning and speed. 1. In order to get a good scan (back then) we had to lay each page flat against a piece of glass (no matter the orientation). This tended to damage or destroy the binding by the time scanning was complete. 2. An average of ten seconds per scan (from page flip to page flip) is blazing fast (including rescans). For a 200 page book this is 33 minutes. To scan a library of 200 books at this rate requires 3.2 man years of work (normal 40 hour work week + holidays). One way to speed this process drastically is to use a bulk scanner. This requires slicing the binding off the book and feeding in the book as a stack of pages, scanning the cover separately. Obviously this completely destroys the book. Good luck.