Book Scanning Goes Viral…Again

Five years after Eliza Zhang’s book-scanning video reached millions of people, the Internet Archive’s page-by-page approach to digitization is capturing attention all over again.

In February 2021, a video of Internet Archive book scanner Eliza Zhang turning the pages of a book went unexpectedly viral. It reached 7.7 million people in its first 48 hours and became one of our most widely seen social posts ever.

Five years later, it happened again.

As renewed attention to the way books are digitized brought new questions about our own scanning practices, people once again discovered Eliza, the Scribe, and the decidedly hands-on process behind the digital books in our collections:

• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/archive.org/post/3mtwbyzi3ek2f
• Mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/deck/@internetarchive/117158143212849382
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DceW6ZikT_g/?img_index=1
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7498467255626907648
• X: https://x.com/internetarchive/status/2092294612568138217
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1814677303237143

A big thank you to Eliza, and to all of the book scanners, digitization staff, librarians, engineers, archivists, and volunteers who spend their days caring for the physical record and making it accessible in digital form.