I don’t know how relevant the samples are, but while the details are lost, the essence seems well preserved. It seems it would be really useful for performing OCR on.

Another reason why I think it failed (TIL Yann LeCun was the coauthor) is the connotation with the pirate books/articles community.

When I came across this format in college days, when handling lots of scanned material, it always triggered the mental “don’t install suspicious software” block. Which is a shame as the article points out it was the superior format.