At OfficeDrop, we’ve been approached by a few magazine publishers who are looking to digitize their old issues. Their magazine scanning projects are really interesting. It makes sense that magazines would want to make their old issues text searchable PDFs that can be shown online and crawled by search engines. All that content is perfect for some SEO love from Google, and people are very likely searching for that sort of content everyday! Yet another neat use of OfficeDrop’s document scanning services.
Picking a magazine scanning services provider
Magazine scanning services require special attention. Most scanners can’t easily scan bound material. Older issues have the problem that ink from the other side of the page can seep through. Older, larger sized magazines may not fit in conventional scanners. If magazines haven’t been properly stored they can have creases or wrinkles that need to be flattened out prior to scanning. Remember that bound material may require cutting or hand scanning - which can become quite expensive.
If you are launching a magazine scanning project, you should first send a few samples to your scanning provider to make sure they can handle your scanning job. We recommend sending both a recent issue and one of the older issues as well. The older issues are the ones that tend to have the most yellowing/color issues and the most ink bleed through, so you’ll want to make sure you can get the quality of scanning that you’ll need.
Also, you’ll want to test the OCR software that your provider will use. Without OCR, your PDFs won’t become text searchable. You need OCR to get search engine traffic to your past issues; otherwise they are images that search engines like Google and Bing can’t see into.
DPI also becomes important if you are going to be displaying the images/PDFs online. If the DPI you pick is too large then you’ll end up with very, very large files and images - and thus they won’t be easy for your magazine readers to view online.
Let us know if we can help you out with a magazine scanning project! Call us at 1-888-674-6493. Good luck with your digitization project!
