Question: Does the book become damaged when you look at the pigments in it? Is it still legible?

Kate Nicholson answered on 7 Mar 2014:

No, we are very careful to cause no harm to the book. If we didn’t turn down the lasers to very low power we might change the pigments, and this is something we knew about before we started working on a priceless book. The reason we study them this way is that we don’t even need to touch them, unlike some methods you may have seen on the TV where they take very tiny samples, we are not able to do this – and I believe that this is the right way to both preserve them and get scientific information from them.
Most of the books we have looked at are still legible, although I don’t speak a word of Latin so they weren’t any good for me to read!