Michael took a printed copy of United States Declaration of Independence to the computer laboratory, where he sat at the teletype terminal and typed this first eBook. He distributed it via email to the people he knew about via the Internet's predecessor, Arpanet, which was available at UIUC. At that moment, the first eBook had been freely distributed to the online community of the day.

Digitization and production techniques, at the time of this first eBook, were ad hoc and informal. A single eBook producer would edit a single file, from a single source. The first eBook's printed source was a single sheet of paper, without hyphenation, a book cover, images, or other characteristics of book-length sources. In 1971, capitalization was not an issue, as only upper case letters were available in the character set used by the system.

Figure 1: Top view of a Model 33 Teletype, salvaged from the computer laboratory where Michael Hart typed the first eBook. The paper roll was where output would be printed.