Book Digitization Service for Islamic Institutions
If your library exists only on paper, it exists only where the paper is. We digitize and translate Islamic book archives — $20 for a book of 100 to 200 pages, finished in under an hour — with Quranic verses and Hadith preserved in Arabic rather than translated away.
$20
per book of 100 to 200 pages
under 1 hr
for that same book
50+
languages out
What digitization has cost until now
The reason most Islamic archives are still on paper is not that nobody wanted them digital. It is that the quote came back in the thousands and the timeline came back in months, and the project quietly died in a committee.
Typing a 500-page book by hand takes a competent typist weeks, and the result still needs proofreading against the original. Professional translation of the same book runs into thousands of dollars. For an institution with two hundred books, that arithmetic has never worked.
At $20 and two hours per book, two hundred books is a few thousand dollars and a matter of days. That is the change. Not a better tool — a different order of magnitude.
What we actually do with your books
1. You send the scans
PDFs, photographs of pages, or scans made years ago on whatever was available. They do not need to be clean. Send one book first so you can judge the result before committing an archive.
2. We read and convert them
Text comes out as editable Unicode with the structure intact — chapter headings stay headings, tables stay tables, poetry keeps its line breaks instead of being flattened into prose.
3. Translation, if you want it
Into any of 50+ languages, including the regional ones most tools ignore: Sindhi, Saraiki, Balochi, Brahui, Pashto, Kashmiri and Hindko. Quranic and Hadith text stays in Arabic.
4. You get Word documents back
Editable files your team can proofread, typeset and publish. Not locked in our platform, not a subscription you have to keep paying to retain access.
The part most tools get wrong
An Islamic book is rarely written in one language. An Urdu commentary quotes the Quran in Arabic. A Fiqh text cites a Hadith mid-sentence and then discusses it. A general translator sees one input in one language and translates all of it — including the ayah.
For ordinary text that is correct. For a religious text it is the one thing that must not happen. Quranic verses and Hadith are preserved in Arabic with their diacritics, and references are kept exactly as the author wrote them — not corrected, not invented.
What we will not claim
Anything going to print should be read by someone qualified. No honest provider tells you otherwise. The difference is that the review is a review rather than a rescue.
On damaged material: badly faded scans usually come through fine. Where a page is barely legible to the human eye, it can fail — and in that case we mark the gap rather than guess. An invented word in a Fiqh text is far worse than a visible blank.
Who this is for
- Publishers with backlists that exist only as printed stock
- Madrasas and Darul Ulooms digitizing a syllabus or library
- Research institutes making collections searchable
- Charities and NGOs distributing material in regional languages
Common questions
How much does it cost to digitize a book?
$20 for a book of 100 to 200 pages. That is the whole book, not a per-page rate, and there is no subscription to maintain between projects.
How long does an archive take?
100 pages every 20 to 25 minutes, so a 500-page book is about two hours. Two hundred books is days, not years.
Will it work on our old scans?
Usually, including quite faded ones. Send one difficult book first — that answers the question better than we can.
Are Quranic verses translated?
No. They are preserved in Arabic with their diacritics. Only the author's own commentary around them is translated.
Who owns the output?
You do. You receive editable Word documents and nothing is published or shared by us.
Can we test before committing?
Yes, and you should. Upload a few pages yourself with no account needed, or send us one book.
Start with one book
Send the hardest one you have. If the output is not good enough, you have lost an afternoon rather than a budget.
Or email contact@qaafai.com
What usually comes next
Typesetting
Right-to-left layout for print and ebook once the text exists.
Arabic & Urdu typesetting →Transliteration
Names and terms in Latin letters for an English edition, or between scripts.
Transliteration tools →Doing it yourself
One credit balance covers translation, transliteration and transcription.
See packages →