What is the difference between printed books that come from original electronic format vs. scanned image books?

Most printed books are prepared for print from the publisher's original computer files. This creates a very high quality book. Many older books in our catalog never existed as digital layout files or their files have been lost. We take these titles and do high resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark: pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.