E-Text Collections and Archives

Many other sites around the world are exploring ways of providing electronic texts through the Internet. "Electronic Texts" may be versions of the classic works of literature (and therefore avoiding copyright issues) or new works created specifically for this medium.

eBooks@Adelaide: our own local collection of electronic texts, currently numbering over 1200 titles. Texts are presented in a format suitable for reading on-screen or for printing. These texts may also be found and accessed through the Library's Web Catalogue.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/
Project Gutenberg: The oldest e-text project, dating back before the Web, now with more than 11,000 titles.
http://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg Australia: An Australian off-shoot of the US-based archive, providing e-texts which are public domain in Australia while still under copyright in the US. This site has a specific focus on Australiana.
http://www.gutenberg.net.au/
American Literature Hypertexts: University of Virginia's collection of some 40 major works by Thoreau, de Tocqueville, Jefferson, Twain and others. Supporting their American Studies program, the site has a mixture of rather plain texts and some interedtingly hyperlinked texts.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHYPER/hypertex.html
Avalon Project: Yale Law School's archive of legal documents, treaties, charters and constitutions.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm
Banned Books On-Line: "special exhibit of books that have been the objects of censorship or censorship attempts... ranging from Ulysses to Little Red Riding Hood" Not actually an archive, more of an exhbibition, but with links to online versions of the texts. The links given are not always the best available, so you might want to search wider for different versions of some.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned-books.html
Bartleby.com: "publishes the classics of literature, nonfiction, and reference free of charge". Well constructed site of around 250 titles. Unfortunately, books are broken into arbitrary chunks, and the text is rather annoyingly beset with advertising and very distracting animated gifs.
http://www.bartleby.com/
Bibliomania: A small collection of Reference, Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry, rather annoyingly presented a page at a time in a frames-based web page. They also claim copyright over the texts (actually of their HTML versions), but the texts are public domain. I guess their presentation might be copyrightable, although that too is debatable. They do offer some "value-added" features, such as "study guides" and the ability to add comments.
http://www.bibliomania.com
Blackmask Online: Extensive collection of works, well designed.
http://www.munseys.com/
CARRIE: An Electronic LIbrary: Originally from the University of Kansas (predominantly indexes texts on other servers).
http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/
A Celebration of Women Writers: "provides a comprehensive listing of links to biographical and bibliographical information about women writers, and complete published books written by women."
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/#A_Section
Eighteenth Century Resources: "covers significant and reliable Internet resources that focus on the eighteenth century -- let's say Milton to Keats. The collection includes information on literature, history, art, music, religion, economics, philosophy, and so on, from around the world, as well as the home pages of societies and people who work on eighteenth-century topics. The site is aimed especially at scholars and students"
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/
The English Server: "The English Server is a progressive student-run cooperative which has been publishing humanities texts to millions of readers online since 1990. Today it distributes over eighteen thousand works, including classics and new writing, representing a wide range of topics in the arts and humanities."
http://eserver.org/
The ETEXT Archives: "home to electronic texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the profane, from the political to the personal." Provides archives of many newsgroups and 'zines' in addition to books.
http://www.etext.org/
Forum Romanum: "a collaborative project among scholars, teachers, and students with the broad purpose of bringing classical scholarship out of college libraries and into a more accessible, online medium"
Internet Classics Archive: "an award-winning, searchable collection of almost 400 classical Greek and Roman texts (in English translation) with user-provided commentary." Apparently dormant, with many broken images, and a lot of the texts are actually links to the Perseus Project. But the desperate may still find something of use. I emailed the webadmin asking about status, but received no response.
http://classics.mit.edu/
The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies: "The Labyrinth provides free, organized access to electronic resources in medieval studies [including] connections to databases, services, texts, and images"
http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/
The Latin Library: A solid collection of texts in Latin, somewhat lacking in presentation, but looks comprehensive.
Luminarium: Attractively presented site with collections in Middle, Renaissance and Seventeenth Century English Literature.
http://www.luminarium.org/
The Litrix Reading Room: Litrix Reading Room is edited by Stan Jones, a mystery novelist and book-lover in Anchorage, Alaska. The Reading Room devotes a section to the literature of the North.
http://www.litrix.com/readroom.htm
An Online Literature Library: this is a personal effort by one individual, who's aim is therefore quality rather than quantity.
http://www.literature.org/
The Online Medieval and Classical Library (DL SunSITE): "a collection of some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization" Impressive.
http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/OMACL/
Online Library of Liberty: "electronic versions of classic books about individual liberty"
http://oll.libertyfund.org/
Oxford Text Archive: "contains electronic versions of literary works by many major authors in Greek, Latin, English and a dozen or more other languages. It contains collections and corpora of unpublished materials prepared by field workers in linguistics. It contains electronic versions of some standard reference works. It has copies of texts and corpora prepared by individual scholars and major research projects worldwide. ... there are over 1300 titles in its catalogue."
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
Perseus Project Home Page: "a continually growing digital library of resources for studying the ancient world. The library's materials include ancient texts and translations, philological tools, maps, extensively illustrated art catalogs, and secondary essays on topics like vase painting."
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Renascence Editions: "is an effort to make available online works printed in English between the years 1477 (when Caxton began printing) and 1799."
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm
Internet Sacred Text Archive: "a freely available non-profit archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics." An excellent collection, also available on CD-ROM.
Samizdat Express: a different, deliberately low-tech approach: required etexts can be supplied on diskette to order.
http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html
SETIS: Australian Literature Database: the publically-accessible collection of the Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service at the University of Sydney Library
http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/oztexts/ozlit.html
Internet Shakespeare Editions
Universal Library: Experimental project hosted by CMU.
http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu/
University of Toronto English Library: UTEL consists mainly of a large database of electronic texts. The texts that have been selected to be included in UTEL are English language texts that are potentially useful to students, especially undergraduate students, of English literature...
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/
The University of Virginia Electronic Text Library: "electronic texts and images are available to University of Virginia users; a good number are freely available to any Internet user. ... All texts are marked up in various forms of SGML, and are converted automatically to HTML each time a user selects a text or performs a search."
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/uvaonline.html
The Victorian Web: A site dedicated to the Victorian era; contains a number of full text works by Victorian authors.
http://www.victorianweb.org/
The Victorian Women Writers Project: "The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century"
http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/index.html
Wiretap: an archive of many classic works.
http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/
World Wide School: an interesting site, with a library of etexts which appear to be repackaged and reformatted Project Gutenberg texts (but what's wrong with that?!), overall quite handsome and nicely done.
http://www.worldwideschool.org/default.htm
Woldwide Piracy -- eTexts: A collection of works devoted to freedom, etc. largely copied from elesewhere, with out value-adding.
http://www.piracy.com/works/

Some sites offering foreign language texts:

Chinese Text Initiative: "an effort to make texts of Chinese literature available on the World Wide Web."
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/chinese
French Electronic Texts: A local directory of French language sites.
http://www.library.adelaide.edu.au/guide/hum/french/etext.html
ARTFL Project: Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html
Association des Bibliophiles Universels: The Association des Bibliophiles Universels (ABU) ... offers French public domain texts
http://abu.cnam.fr/
ATHENA: "Books, Literature, Arts, Science, Mineralogy" Specialises in Swiss and French language texts
http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/athome.html
BitBlioteca: Mainly Spanish texts, but also English and French
http://www.analitica.com/bitblio/bitblio.htm
CELT Project: "The CELT project aims to produce an online database of contemporary and historical topics from many areas, including literature and the other arts."
http://celt.ucc.ie/
Le Chateau: Les rayonnages de la bibliothèque vous proposent plus de 100 livres électroniques : les textes de la littérature classique francaise en Hyperlivres.
http://www.le-chateau.ilias.com/
Italian Literature in HTML: Classic and contemporary texts of varied genre.
http://www.crs4.it/HTML/Literature.html
Projekt Gutenberg-DE: Works in German: "Mit dem Projekt Gutenberg-DE ermöglichen wir eine ganz neue Form des Zugangs zur Literatur. Unsere Leser können Bücher 'online' lesen, nach bestimmten Büchern suchen oder in Bibliotheken stöbern."
http://gutenberg.aol.de/gutenb.htm
Progetto Manuzio (Liber Liber): "... il progetto Manuzio consiste nella fondazione di una biblioteca di testi elettronici, accessibili gratuitamente via Internet."
http://www.liberliber.it/
Project Runeberg: Nordic Literature
http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/
REESWeb : Russian and East European Studies: has good links to sites with Russian and Eastern European texts.
http://www.pitt.edu/~cjp/
19th-Century German Stories: Features works with illustrations and translations by the Wilhelm Busch, the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Hoffman.
http://www.vcu.edu/hasweb/for/menu.html

Some other places to look:

Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature: "lists Internet sources for literary texts in the western European languages other than English."
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/wess/etexts.html
Guide to Etext Directories: http://www.westciv.com.au/Etext_Pages/etext_directories.html
Other National Literatures: part of Jack Lynch's Literary Resources pages
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/other.html