I'm creating a website that will have avatars of several book covers. Whenever I scan a book cover and reduce it for my website the image loses most of its clarity; the text becomes unreadable. The same is true for book covers I have created on my computer. What can I do to prevent the loss of clarity? Thanks.
 

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Answer from Richard Rost:

Whenever you scan an image and then reduce it, you're going to lose SOME image quality. You just need to make small thumbnails of the book covers for your web site? If that's the case, your web design program might have an auto-thumbnail feature. I know that I use FrontPage/Expression Web and they can quickly and easily create a small autothumbnail of whatever size I specify (200 pixels across, say) and the quality looks pretty good. See if yours has the same.