The Internet Archive stopped generating DjVu files for new text uploads in February 2016, citing declining use, file-creation errors, and an unsupportable Java viewer

On 26 February 2016, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle announced on the Archive's own forum that it would cease producing DjVu files for newly uploaded texts: "The Internet Archive will soon stop creating DJVU files for uploaded text files. The reasons for this are declining use, errors in the creation of new files, and the difficultly for our supporting the java viewer." The stated causes are threefold — falling demand, unreliable file creation, and the maintenance burden of DjVu's Java-applet viewer, which had grown untenable as browsers deprecated Java plugins.

The announcement concerns new uploads only; existing DjVu files in the Archive remain preserved. What ended was the format's role as living, actively-generated infrastructure at one of the web's largest text repositories.

This closes a narrative arc for the format co-built by future Turing laureates (claim-djvu-1998-paper-coauthored-by-lecun-and-bengio): a compression scheme created expressly to make scanned documents freely and cheaply distributable was, within two decades, declared legacy at exactly the kind of institution its free-books mission was meant to serve. The proximate cause was not a rival format but ordinary infrastructural decay — a viewer technology (Java in the browser) that the wider web abandoned out from under it.