Jim Regan -- Site Reviews
Where to find e-lit on the Web
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Of all distributors of electronic literature, the first on the scene was Project Gutenburg, an enterprise that traces its origins all the way back to 1971 (before the Big Bang, in Net years). Currently, Gutenburg boasts a catalog of more than 2000 public domain titles, and authors represented run from Aesop to Emile Zola, with an average of one new e-text being added each day.
The design of Gutenburg's site is so basic as to look unfinished, but visitors don't come here to see the sights. As well as links to Project Gutenburg's history and philosophy, news, and technical info, the home page allows surfers to browse for material by Author or Title, use a keyword search, or even download complete Author and Title lists for off line perusal.
Before browsing for specific works, visitors are instructed to select the nearest server hosting the material, (currently there are 29 servers around the world). Individual texts are then only a few clicks away. Each title has its own page, (with information layout familiar to anyone who has used library card catalogs) and links to a text- and a compressed 'Zip-' file of the chosen work. If, after hunting down a favorite document, you find that your server is too busy to allow a download, you can simply select another from the pull-down menu and go directly to that server's page for the chosen title.
(All the works at Project Gutenburg are supplied in "Plain Vanilla ASCII", which means that no special viewers or software are required for reading the document, and text searches can be performed with nothing more complicated than a word processor's Find/Search command.)
With a Web publishing history that dates to 1994, Bartleby.com offers a slightly more commercial alternative -- both in terms of design and intent -- with fewer titles, but a more elaborate interface. In addition to pull-down menus accessing Bartleby's selection of Reference, Verse, Fiction and Non-Fiction offerings, (the latter three sorted by author) Bartleby's homepage also includes weekly features, quotes of the day, and an online bookstore. (The pull-down menus, while evidently set up to work both with and without JavaScript -- using a "Go" button in the latter case -- only seem to function with JavaScript on.)
Having chosen an author, visitors are taken to a brief biography, and list of works available. The documents themselves are optimized for online reading -- rather than the "Plain Vanilla ASCII" of Gutenburg. Bartleby's texts are integral parts of their Web pages (complete with banner ads, navigation bars, etc) with longer publications broken into chapters on separate pages, and while this definitely makes online reading more digestible, getting 'clean' copies for off line reading becomes a rather more complicated affair.
Of course, you could just forgo text altogether, and have your computer read to you, now that we also have the option of 'e-AudioBooks', as offered by MP3Lit.com. An entirely commercial site, and the only one of the three to offer current works alongside the classics, MP3Lit (launched last October) offers free spoken word performances of, or by, favorite and lesser known authors, as, ".. a vehicle for writers and publishers to distribute their recorded works directly to the public via digital audio".
With the layout of an online magazine, (feature articles and interviews down the center of the page, an index of 'Channels' down the left, and Top 20 list on the right) MP3Lit offers everything from John Grisham reading his own work and Frank McCourt interpreting James Joyce, to excerpts from The Onion, a rare recording of J.R.R Tolkien reading from The Lord of the Rings, and classic pieces from such New Yorker writers as E.B. White and Dorothy Parker.
Like Bartleby, each selection provides a brief biography to accompany the readings, which are available in both MP3 and RealAudio formats. Recordings run from 2 to 20 minutes, so while you might find entire poems or short stories, there are no complete novels here. (Although there are excerpts, with invitations to purchase full versions of the recordings or books online.) Additional features offered by MP3Lit include live author chats, LitBoard, (a forums page) and LoudMouth, which gives aspiring poets and writers a chance to submit their own work for posting at the site.
Any one of these sites could keep you busy for a very long time, and dropping "electronic literature" into a search engine will give you even more options, so although paper is perfectly safe for the time being, the 'e' option can't be ignored.
Project Gutenburg can be found at http://promo.net/pg/, with Bartleby at http://www.bartleby.com and MP3Lit at http://www.mp3lit.com/.
Jim Regan provides 'Today's Links' to the e--Monitor. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.