---
title: "By Yann LeCun's own account, DjVu was built to distribute high-resolution scans cheaply over the early internet, demoed by freely releasing the NIPS proceedings at nips.djvu.org"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
audit_status: "capture-verified — 2026-08-13 verification (10-inbox/raw/2026-08-13-verify-lecuns-account-of-djvus-free-books-purpose.md) re-fetched the source X post directly (it resolved cleanly this session) and preserved the verbatim quote below with source_sha. This RESOLVES the prior '[unverified-quote]' flag recorded 2026-07-09, and corrects source_date, previously misrecorded as 2023-01-03 — the post is timestamped 7:41 PM, 2 January 2024. One discrepancy remains open, not resolved: LeCun states '13 volumes' but the archived nips.djvu.org table of contents lists 14 (Volumes 0–13) — see body. | 2026-07-09 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): superseded on the quote/date points by the above."
source_url: "https://x.com/ylecun/status/1742269871168111018"
source_title: "Yann LeCun on X: \"Let me tell a story about free books...\""
source_author: "Yann LeCun (personal account, X/Twitter)"
source_date: "2024-01-02T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Let me tell a story about free books. In the mid 1990s, I started a project called DjVu at AT&T Labs. The purpose was to devise a new image compression format so that printed documents could be scanned at high resolution and distributed efficiently over the newly expanding Internet. [...] As a useful demonstration of the technology, I decided to scan and distribute the complete collection of proceedings of the Neural Information Processing conference (NIPS). I asked the publishers, Morgan Kaufman and MIT Press, for permission to do that. They agreed because they weren't making any revenue from past proceedings. We scanned the 13 volumes, OCRed and indexed all of the material, and put it up on a free website in 2000: nips.djvu.org This open-access repository turned out to be *extremely* useful to the machine learning research community. [...] Eventually, the NIPS conference stopped making printed proceedings and started hosting all the books on their website ( nips.cc ), including our scans."
source_sha: "8876e6bfb80094148fe78d12f107624f5d40a8c303556489ed5ea113e4901524"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-djvu-lecun-bengio-book-compression.md, 2026-07-09; verified and updated via promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-13-verify-lecuns-account-of-djvus-free-books-purpose.md, 2026-08-13"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260709-1653-hop-djvu-lecun-bengio-book-compression","20260813-0225-verify-lecuns-account-of"]
date_created: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["djvu","lecun","at-t-labs","image-compression","free-knowledge","nips","history-of-ml","internet-archive"]
audits: ["2026-07-09 claude-fable-5"]
drafted_in: ["2026-07-13-we-never-unrolled-it","we-never-unrolled-it"]
seek_code_commit: "c1e7696"
---


In his own retelling, [[entity-yann-lecun|Yann LeCun]] describes the purpose of
[[claim-djvu-1998-paper-coauthored-by-lecun-and-bengio|DjVu]], a project he
started at AT&T Labs in the mid-1990s, directly: "The purpose was to devise a
new image compression format so that printed documents could be scanned at
high resolution and distributed efficiently over the newly expanding
Internet." He frames the whole account as "a story about free books." As a
demonstration, his team scanned the NIPS conference proceedings — by his own
account "the 13 volumes" — OCRed and indexed them, and put them on a free
website in 2000, **nips.djvu.org**, after Morgan Kaufmann and MIT Press (the
publishers of record) granted permission because they were not making revenue
on past proceedings. A companion reply in the same thread credits a further,
separate permission negotiation with Springer for NIPS Volume 0 (1987),
originally published by the nonprofit American Institute of Physics before its
rights passed to Springer.

This claim was **flagged `[unverified-quote]`** from 2026-07-09 to 2026-08-13:
the only source was this same X/Twitter post, which had returned HTTP 402 at
the original capture time and reached the vault only as a search-engine
summary, with no verbatim phrasing preserved. A 2026-08-13 verification
session re-fetched the post directly and preserved the quote above with
`source_sha` — **the flag is now resolved.** The same session corrected the
`source_date`: the post is timestamped 2 January 2024, not 2023-01-03 as
originally recorded (a full year off).

One discrepancy remains open, deliberately unresolved rather than smoothed
over: LeCun states the demo covered "13 volumes," but a 2024 Wayback Machine
crawl of the site's own table-of-contents page lists 14 numbered volumes, 0
through 13, spanning NIPS 1987 through NIPS 2000. No source states the count
explicitly at both the 2000 launch and the 2024 crawl, so it is plausible the
original release covered volumes 0–12 (1987–1999) and Volume 13 (NIPS 2000,
published by MIT Press in 2001) was added afterward — but this is inference,
not confirmed fact.

The freed NIPS archive also links this note to the vault's NETtalk cluster: the
earliest volume, "NIPS 0 (1987)," contains a paper by Terry Sejnowski, lead author
of the NETtalk paper ([[claim-nettalk-1987-complex-systems-distinct-from-1986-report]]).
NETtalk itself appeared in *Complex Systems*, not NIPS, so it is not in the freed
corpus — the connection runs through the author, not the document.

As of 2026-08-13, `nips.djvu.org` itself no longer resolves — see
[[claim-nips-djvu-org-domain-no-longer-resolves-2026]] — though the archive's
mission persisted structurally: see
[[claim-neurips-absorbed-free-nips-proceedings-into-papers-nips-cc]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The theme rhymes with the vault's own
> [[claim-perceptrons-1969-standalone-scan-not-freely-available|no-free-1969-scan]]
> finding: a tool built expressly to make scanned books free forever is, a quarter
> century on, both deprecated as infrastructure (see
> [[claim-internet-archive-2016-stopped-generating-djvu]]) and possibly offline at
> its own demo URL. Free access to text turns out to demand continuous
> maintenance, not just a good format. — Seek
>
> **2026-08-13 update:** "possibly offline" is now confirmed — nips.djvu.org
> fails DNS resolution outright. But the softer finding is the more interesting
> one: the mission didn't die with the domain. NeurIPS's own site quietly
> absorbed the same early volumes — the infrastructure LeCun built rotted; the
> free access he built it *for* found a new host. That's a better ending than
> the one I predicted in July. — Seek