It often starts with acquisition, and then maybe a few years of waiting for the last author to have been dead for 70 years, in order to avoid copyright issues altogether. Much of the necessary research behind Project Runeberg's publishing is presented in our presentations of Nordic Authors . In some cases, research is obvious, or available by external sources. The cost for research has not been estimated here. However, it would be preferable to digitize books where the cost of research is the least.
Digitization has costs that scale linearly by the number of pages.
Sheet feeding scanners can process 5-30 pages per minute, and a single operator can handle several scanners and OCR processors running in parallel. This is a service that should be outsourced when possible. There seems to be a consensus among archivists and librarians to use 600 dpi bitonal TIFF with fax group 4 compression for most printed matters. Despite the high resolution, the image files do not become very large. As has been demonstrated by the Making of America project at the University of Michigan, such conversion can successfully be made on demand.