Starting around 1996 the California-based company Octavo began scanning rare and important books from libraries around the world.

These scans were done at extremely high resolution using high-quality equipment, with some pages at over 200MB each.

In 2006 the "Rare Book Room" website was created which contains the complete collection in medium to medium-high resolution freely available to the public through a web browser or as a PDF file.

Some high resolution versions are still being sold by Octavo through a separate website.

It includes Library of Congress copies of Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin,[19] and other rare editions: a Gutenberg Bible of 1455, William Harvey's book on the circulation of blood, Galileo ’s Sidereus Nuncius,[20] the first printing of the United States Bill of Rights, and Magna Carta.