Literature Online

The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts provides access to texts by more than 100 authors of English and American literature and Western philosophy. Researchers can electronically search the contents of Alex documents for keywords and phrases.

Bartleby bills itself as "the preeminent Internet publisher of literature, reference and verse, providing students, researchers and the intellectually curious with unlimited access to books and information on the web, free of charge." The site is particularly easy to navigate.
Bibliomania calls itself "the leading online literature library with hundreds of searchable full text classics: a superb educational resource." For each title, Bibliomania provides an author biography, book summary, and links to related sites. Other Bibliomania resources include study guides and teacher resources.
Classic Reader allows visitors to "read, search, and annotate great works of literature by authors such as Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and many others." The site also offers biographies of many authors.

The Online Books Page provides an index of more than 13,000 English works. All are freely available for noncommercial use.
The Oxford Text Archive advertises that it "distributes more than 2500 resources in over 25 different languages, and is actively working to extend its catalogue of holdings." Researchers can electronically search the contents of OTA documents for keywords and phrases.
Page By Page Books is designed to make online reading easy' "no matter how much you read at a time, you can bookmark it and come back to exactly the right place."
Project Gutenberg offers a vast selection of "free plain vanilla electronic texts" which have been prepared by hundreds of volunteers. Project Gutenberg publishes all materials in this ASCII format so "that 99% of the hardware and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files."

The University of Virginia Electronic Text Center maintains a collection of approximately 51,000 texts. Unfortunately, many of those texts are not in public domain, so only researchers affiliated with UV can access them. In addition to the texts, UV provides the facsimiles of original illustrations, covers, and other images.

This page was last updated on September 21, 2004, by DJW.