General Book Digitization Guidelines

We often hear about book scanning and book digitization, but is it more than laying a book on a scanner? We tend to say it is way more than that.

We will start with the first issue, copyright.

Copyright or having the rights to that book gives you the right to scan it, only for your personal use.
Most scanning companies will ask you for a disclaimer, saying basically that you will not transfer the scan to other businesses or individuals, and you do it for personal use only. Of course there are individuals who will try and sell the copy, but remember, having the book in your property will only give you the right to scan it for personal use. Try and be one of the good guys. Second of all, think why you're doing the scan. For example, if you want to take some of your books with you on a holiday, without having a big luggage, you might want to make sure the files generated are small, and load up fast enough.
Because you are on a holiday, you'll read in very often but short stints, so waiting too much for a book to load up will only frustrate you.
Color, grayscale or bitonal? Most of the scanning providers will charge you extra for color scanning, therefore save on the aspects that don't affect you.

Usually color scanning gives you good quality of images, and where every image detail is critical, it is highly recommended.

Bitonal scanning on the other hand won't get you far on images, so avoid it when your images are relevant.

On the other hand, for novels or other books where images are not important or don't exist at all, take the bitonal option.
It will always be the cheapest, and will give you very good readability. Also, it will be the least tiresome for your eyes.
In the middle we have grayscale scanning.
This will give you decent images and good readability for text. Also, it's somewhere in the middle when it comes to pricing, so we could name it a good compromise.
This is the first part of the article on book scanning guidelines and good practices.

The next article will be an indepth analyses on the two main options of scanning a book, destructive or non destructive scanning.
As this is quite a vast area, for better understanding it will require to be treated separately.