1,702,375 itemsWelcome to Text Archive

Welcome to the Open-Access Text Archive. This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses. Check our FAQ for more information.

Recent Internet Archive blog posts focused on Texts:

• Guest Blogger: Barbara Janis of the Presidio Trust
• Celebrate Banned Books Week 2009
• Travels with the FWP
• Special Collections From the UCLA Scanning Center
• Welcoming the “Share” Button
• The Library of Congress at Your Fingertips
• Yiddish Literature Online

Please feel free to contribute your texts! (Uploaders, please try to set a Creative Commons license as part of the upload process, so people know what they can do with your texts - thanks!)

All items (most recently added first) -

The Internet Archive provides an invaluable service by scanning out-of-print and out-of-copyright texts, but how useful is the service for research? Google Books has notoriously bad metadata (labeling half of their books as from 1899), so I’d like to hope that the Internet Archive is doing better when it comes to metadata, but why is there no good browsing mechanism? Why have these books not been professionally classified? For even half-way serious research the ability to find books of kin is invaluable, and spotty search (even advanced search), just doesn’t cut it. Let’s bring back browsing.