Other technologies have attempted to bridge the gap between the paper and digital worlds. The Exbiblio approach has one key difference: no changes to the printing or publishing of documents need to be made for this to become possible — right now.

The majority of our paper documents now exist in electronic form. In cases where the documents are not publicaly accessible, they could be made so for a fee or with appropriate rights management. This means that a reader can use any optical scanner - like a smartphone camera - as the point of entry for ExBiblio to find the corresponding digital version of the document. Once you can link a paper document to its digital version, the paper you hold is transformed into a physical Web page.

Exbiblio brings to the world of books, newspapers, magazines and other printed materials the dynamic, interactive capabilities we've all come to expect from a Web page. In most cases, instead of scanning and processing every page, Exbiblio only needs to capture about six words. In short, any snippet of existing text in a document becomes an identifying barcode, identifying both the document and your location within it. It achieves this at a faster, more fundamental and transparent level of context than any conventional system of reference.