At first, every book lover is likely to be hesitant about switching over to digitised books – I was myself not so long ago. But while it’s great to hold a paper book in your hands, to feel the pages as you flick through, eventually, it’s simply impractical.
You run out of space, and every time you buy a new book, you have to give away an old favourite. Digitised books offer an excellent solution to this quandary, in addition to other nice perks. Let’s look at the benefits of book scanning from a team like Pearl Scan.
You can actually find your books
In a disorganised library, finding a book can be a frustrating and time-consuming procedure. It could be even more difficult if some of your books are in long-term storage, which is an inevitable necessity if you keep buying them as physical, paper books.
Finding your books is easy when they’re digitised. It couldn’t be simpler: just enter the title or author into the search bar, and the book will appear. With all that saved time, you can read even more.
Save time at work
If the books and files you need to digitise are for work-related purposes, you stand to save a significant amount of time and effort. Recent studies show that the average worker spends around 20-30% of their workday simply searching for information.
That amounts to a massive amount of wasted time and energy over the months and years, wasted time that can be saved if you simply implement a more efficient document management system.
If the professional books and documents that you regularly need to refer to are digitised, not only can you then find those books at the click of a button, but you can also find what you’re looking for within the book or document incredibly easily.
To ensure this, it’s important to check if the book scanning service you use is OCR (optical character recognition) capable. This means that it can pick out the characters in the book you’re having scanned, so that you can then enter them in a search bar if you want to scan the text for specific information.
Never run out of space
Books take up a significant amount of space – some of the largest public buildings throughout history have been libraries. If you’re a prolific reader, it’s only a question of time before space becomes a limiting factor, and you have to start discarding other books to make space for new ones.
With digitised books, you can have almost infinite books; a 2 terabyte hard drive, that you can buy nowadays for around £50, will fit around 200,000, illustrations and all – that’s a lot of books. You can still have a library of physical books that are special to you, but it can be a much smaller selection than you’d have otherwise.
Optimise your approach to HR
When it comes to archiving employee records, paper records are quite old hat. This is especially the case when it comes to longer, more in depth records. For HR departments, scanning and digitising books can be massively beneficial, especially when it’s necessary to find certain information on an employee’s past in a limited timeframe.
Share books with friends
Books as an art form are one of the more challenging things to share experientially with other people. You can go to the cinema with friends, listen to music together, and look at paintings sitting side by side, but with a book, you need to read it one at a time, each person taking days at a minimum, more likely weeks.
With digitised books, the sharing process could not be simpler. Instead of having one book that can only be read by one individual at a time, you can have infinite digital copies that you can give to all of your friends. Book club anyone?
Protect your library
Finally, digitised books are much less susceptible to damage than paper books, which are some of the more delicate things that a person is likely to own. You can back your digital files up on the cloud, and can share them with your clumsier friends without having to worry that they’ll spill coffee on your favourite chapter.
Clearly, there are multiple significant benefits to owning digitised books. You don’t have to scan your whole library, of course, but scanning a majority of your collection will enable sharing, save space, and ensure that your books don’t become damaged.
