Once it is scanned, the work is preserved as an image, and you still can not search it. OCR often fails because it is so old and worn. Interestingly enough, i

Once it is scanned, the work is preserved as an image, and you still can not search it. OCR often fails because it is so old and worn. Interestingly enough, in order to actually do this, you need to scan, photograph, or otherwise digitize it to begin with, so the output of this is both what you seek (a scanned image) AND the actual content. Everyone wins.