By Yann LeCun's account, DjVu was built to distribute high-resolution scans cheaply over the early internet, demoed by freely releasing the NIPS 1988–1999 proceedings at nips.djvu.org

In his own retelling, Yann LeCun describes the purpose of DjVu as distributing high-resolution document scans cheaply over the "newly expanding" internet of the late 1990s — a bandwidth problem, in an era of slow dial-up, that a better-compressing format could solve. As a demonstration, LeCun's account says the team scanned and freely released the entire NIPS conference proceedings archive — volumes 0–13, covering 1988–1999 — hosting it at nips.djvu.org starting around 2000, where it became a genuine resource for the machine-learning community rather than a mere technical demo.

This claim is flagged [unverified-quote]. The source is a single X/Twitter post; it returned HTTP 402 when the capturing session tried to re-fetch it, so the account reaches the vault only through a search-engine summary and no verbatim phrasing was preserved. The free-books framing and the specific NIPS volume range should be read as what LeCun is reported to have said, not as independently confirmed history. Verification — re-reading the post verbatim or finding LeCun's account in a citable venue, and confirming the NIPS 0–13 release — is routed at question-verify-lecun-djvu-free-nips-archive.

There is a second, self-undercutting detail worth recording: nips.djvu.org appears to be unreachable (a DNS failure during the capture session), so the free-access artifact this story is built around may itself have rotted — a question also folded into that verification thread.

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.