From those days

 In the initial stages of www content sharing ment making available books, music, video etc was taken up both free and paid.

The competition was high and technology was suited to European languages and Indic languages suffered.

Even typewriters were not available let alone computer integration.

Digitalisation of books started with scanning and storing in picture and PDF format. This storing method called for huge memory. Simple text format for literary works was thought to ease the process of storing, sharing, searching on internet.

Good that typing text using computers became advanced and extracting text from scanned pictures was next improvement.

However this mode was limited for QWERTY based languages for a long.

Enthusiasts developed typing and computerising other languages.

At that stage presence of Kannada in web was almost absent. I joined one group which was putting Kannada books in text format in a web-site.

Take a book and type the contents and post it. I did type 550 page book for them.

Slowly scanning books and crude OCR came handy.

Tesseract was developing program for OCR for all languages.  Using their main work a small

group here was evolving Sub program for Kannada. This was used in the beginning and books were digitalised. Output being crude editing was also tedious.

Editing is required even now with all the improvement.

Our portal www.chilume.com

hosts only already published works for being free from editorial rigour.

We collect permisson to put books in our portal and then proceed to scan, OCR and edit for  faults  before publication.

I have contributed in these functions to a considerable extent.

All this purely voluntary and anonymous