From one copy to a book in print.

The same steps for a family’s ten copies and for a book on general sale. What changes is how many copies are printed and who can buy them.

1. We look first

Clear photographs or a scan are enough to quote. Before quoting we check who owns the rights to the text and the pictures, and where the book can be sold. The quote is fixed: scope, price, timetable and the stages of payment, agreed before any paid work begins.

2. We capture the book without harming it

To make the edition we need the book itself. You send it tracked and insured, and it comes back to you tracked when the work is done. Your quote prices two ways of scanning it. The careful way keeps the book whole: we scan it on a CZUR overhead book scanner, which photographs the open book from above, so the spine is never pressed flat or cracked; it takes longer and costs more. The quicker, cheaper way cuts the binding away so the loose pages can be scanned flat; the book does not come back as it was. We cut a binding only if you choose that in writing. The scanner’s software uses AI to straighten the curve of each page in the image and to read the text. It does not draw anything.

3. We keep every picture

Every plate and drawing is reproduced from the best copy we can find, in colour where it was printed in colour, and placed where the author put it. We clean away dust, stains and the print showing through from the other side of the page. We never redraw a picture, never extend or fill one with AI or any other software, and never sharpen a poor copy into detail the artist did not draw. When the only surviving copy is soft, we say so.

4. We set the text again

The text is set afresh in clean type, not photographed from an old copy, so it is sharp at any size and the same text makes the ebook and the audiobook. The scanner’s AI text recognition reads the pages, and the result is checked word by word against the page images. The author’s spelling, wording and order are kept. Plain printer’s errors are corrected. Anything we add, a foreword, a note on the edition, an index, is marked as ours.

5. You read the proof

You read and approve a full proof before anything is printed. One round of corrections is included, and errors we introduce are always corrected free.

6. Into print

A family edition is printed to order, ten copies to begin with, and stays private: no ISBN and no listings. An edition for sale gets ISBNs, a hardback, paperback and ebook, retail and trade listings, and a page of its own. Printing is done to order in the United Kingdom, so nothing sits in a warehouse and nothing is pulped. Where your book can be sold: Amazon, bookshops and libraries through Ingram, the ebook stores, and the audiobook stores that take synthetic narration.

What we never do

• Make, redraw, extend or fill a picture with AI or any other software. AI helps us scan and read a page; it never draws.
• Change the author’s words, or modernise them.
• Photograph old pages and call the result a new edition.
• Make a voice of someone who has died. Narration is synthetic and labelled as such.

See it done: Daffy Goes to Sea, from the copy to the new edition. Then tell us about your book.