At the university library where I work I documented the process of taking a hard-cover book and turning it into a PDF file. The librarian cuts it out of its cover (an exacto blade to the paper hinge between the hard cover and the bound "signatures") and then with a large sharp guillotine sort of blade chops off the stitched side of the book guts. It is fed into a powerful scanner that flips pages to get both sides. When the scan is complete, the book is wrapped with a special kind of four-way library rubberband and sent out to the printer to have it re-bound. Perfect binding this time.

To outside viewers, it is quite a violent process.

SRS