Really? A comment on the page I linked said:

> The presenter mentions that about 40% of books scanned have some kind of problem, either a folded or a torn page, but they’ve done some work on preventing problems.

Even if every page in 40% of books were damaged, that would only be 40% of pages, not all of them. Although your numbers may be incredibly wrong, your steel-manned assumed thesis is valid: with historical artifacts you can only accept a lower % of damaged pages than human-powered scanning would cause.