Most American high schoolers are expected to read and understand the United States Declaration of Independence, the document responsible for founding America as a separate nation. Now, they can access it in a new format.

On this day, July 4th, in 1971, college student Michael Hart created the first digital book when he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer at the University of Illinois.

Over time, e-books expanded to cover a wide variety of topics. E-books were once just the electronic version of a printed book, but some books now start off solely in electronic form. To accommodate this new technology, e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook have become more and more popular.