By the early 1990s, scanning and optical character recognition (OCR)
started to become widely available. Hart received a full scanning
station via a grant from a computer manufacturer, which was used to
produce several of the first 100 eBooks. The scanner was a flatbed
model, which required the user to hold the book open, scan a page (or
pair of pages) for ingest to the OCR software, then flip to the next
page.
The OCR software would then automatically recognize the characters from
the scan, and create an editable view of the text. Proofreading and
formatting would then occur in the same way as for a typed text.
A few years later, Project Gutenberg worked with Distributed
Proofreaders to acquire sheet-fed scanners. These scanners, which are
still in operation, are faster. They also tend to produce an image
that is properly aligned, versus the skewing that sometimes occurs
with flatbed scanners. An important difference is the printed books
are damaged: prior to scanning, the spines of the books are cut off, in
order for the individual pages to be ingested by the scanner.
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