XplanaZine

This is by no means a complete list – it is more a list of “My Favorites”, the sites that I turn to again and again when searching or browsing for complete book texts online.
Internet Public Library Books at IPL.org. The IPL does not actually host online texts, but instead provides a searchable collection of links to online texts at other sites, currently 20,000 titles included. It is also browsable by Dewey Decimal Classification System. The project is sponsored by the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. You will also find lots of other useful materials here, including a detailed world newspapers listing.
Online Books Page (Penn). The Online Books Page is similar to the IPL Books page. It is not a repository of texts online, but a collection of links – currently around 19,000. It is searchable by author and title and can be browsed by Library of Congress classification. They also feature a Banned Books Exhibit (which is regularly updated from time to time; it’s fascinating reading!).
Babelot at Eulogos (Italy). This admirable international project is the sponsor of Babelot, a multilingual index of books online: links to 25153 texts; 15927 works; 5198 authors; 39 languages, from 25 online text sources – searchable by author and title only. Eulogos is also the home of Intratext, which actually hosts online text in XML-based formats. Although you are not allowed to reuse these texts, they have some extraordinary features, such as concordances, reverse-word lists, and so on (instructions for these features are sometimes in English, sometimes not, depending on the language of the text in question).
Project Gutenberg. This is the granddaddy of them all, and still going strong. It’s been around for over 30 years, and has completed close to 7000 books online! You can search by author, title, subject, language and Library of Congress category. Most Gutenberg books are public domain, although there are a few that have copyright restrictions. Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading is a great way to get involved, adding to the ever-expanding range of content that is made available through PG. The Distributed Proofreaders have completed 1388 books, with 492 in process at this time, 50 of them in proofing stage.
Electronic Text Center (University of Virginia). Although some materials here are restricted to users at the University of Virginia, you will find wonderful resources online at this site: there are 10,000 texts online here that are publicly accessible. The projects maintained at this site frequently contain digital images as well (about half of the 350,000 related images are publicly available). One of the missions of the ETC is assist users in developing standards-compliant text projects – take a look at the great new Walt Whitman Archive. And of course one of my favorite projects here is the Ovid Collection.
Bartleby.com. Absolutely valuable website but be warned: the books online at Bartleby are generally not public domain! Fortunately, the individual sections of books and entries in the dictionaries and encyclopedias are directly addressable, so it is easy to link to specific materials (including articles in the Columbia Encyclopedia online). The literature resources available here are especially strong – including the complete Harvard Classics.
So these are some of the “biggies”, large general collections or large collections of links. You can find an excellent annotated list of more specific sites at the IPL Links page or at Columbia’s Electronic Text Service (with separate listings by Language and by Subject). There are, of course, lots of other specialized sites that are not included in the these lists. Some sites that I am absolutely dependent on which for some reason did not make either of these lists is the Sacred Texts Archive and TEAMS Middle English Texts. And for individual effort, take a look at the poetry and translations of Tony Kline, who writes primarily for the Internet and publishes his works online for download and free distribution: fabulous!
What are your favorite online text sites? There’s a “Discuss” button up at the top of the page – let me know, and I’ll post them here!