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.

Figure 3: Image from the Doré illustrations of Dante's Inferno

Scanners are used for images within printed books, which are typically included as JPEG, GIF or PNG items within HTML and other formats. Inline images may be at a lower resolution, and then clickable to obtain higher resolution images. Color scanners are used, whenever possible, for color images.