Electronic Texts

Since then (only two years ago, mind you), my research has thrown up a thriving number of additional Web sites devoted to making available electronic versions of literature — classic and not-so-classic. So in this issue I propose, not only to mention briefly some of these newer venues, but also to consolidate in the list at the end of the article all such sites (old and new) that I can really recommend from personal experience.

To start with, let me suggest that for a vast list of online texts you should regularly visit this Netscape site. Admittedly, a few links in the Netscape selection offer you some dubious modern texts by so far unrecognised authors. Likewise, some links send you to sites that will let you read or download texts only if you pay, or otherwise “join” their enterprise.

For the most part, however, the Netscape list will prove a very helpful jumping-off point. Certainly, some of the sites I’m about to endorse I discovered just that way.

Take this one, for example: Books-On-Line. This is useful because you can use the familiar Dewey library classification to search. You know,

plus the subdivisions of these subject classes.

I was particularly happy to latch on to Classics at the Online Literature Library. Where else can you get the complete fiction of H.G. Wells in electronic form? Not just the best known novels like The War of the Worlds, either, but also the minor ones like The Wheels of Chance. Other authors represented here (though not necessarily in their complete works) include

Take a look at Bibliomania, too. Here on offer are etexts in the following categories:

Which means that you’ll find things like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Clausewitz’ On War, plus gems like Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a fascinating double book from 1841 and 1852, which treats “crowd psychology and mass mania throughout history”, and which perhaps deserves its own essay in Bikwil some time.

Next we turn to a site calling itself Blackmask Online. Although a large proportion of its texts are of most interest to U.S. users, e.g.

there is also a selection of other literature (the foreign works are in English), such as

Now, in case that Netscape selection of etext sites doesn’t satisfy you, I can only suggest you rush right over to LETRS, a massive site maintained by Indiana University. Here you’ll find a very comprehensive list of links to etext sites which features not only works in English (and therefore overlaps some of the sites I’ve already covered here, as all such lists do a bit), but also a huge selection of foreign language resources classified by language. Over 20 languages are listed. Some might wish for less of the academic, but I for one am not complaining. Stuff like