can be browsed by author, by title or by
subject; pointers to significant directories and archives of on-line texts; and
special exhibits. From the main search page, users have options to search for
four types of media: books, music, art, and video.

"Along with books, The On-Line Books Page is also now listing major archives of
serials (such as magazines, published journals, and newspapers), as of June
1998. Serials can be at least as important as books in library research. Serials
are often the first places that new research and scholarship appear. They are
sources for firsthand accounts of contemporary events and commentary, They are
also often the first (and sometimes the only) place that quality literature
appears. (For those who might still quibble about serials being listed on a
'books page', back issues of serials are often bound and reissued as hardbound
'books'.)"

Web space and computing resources are provided by the School of Computer Science
at Carnegie Mellon University. The On-Line Books Page participates in the
Experimental Search System of the Library of Congress. It works with The
Universal Library Project, also hosted at Carnegie Mellon University.

In his e-mail to me of September 2, 1998, John Mark Ockerbloom explained how the
site began:

"I was the original Webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local Web in 1993.
The local Web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources,
and originally The On-Line Books Page was just one of these pages, containing
pointers to some books put on-line by some of the people in our department.
(Robert Stockton had made Web versions of some of Project Gutenberg's texts.)

After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed
that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other
places) had books on-line, and that it would be useful to have some listing of
all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from
all over the Net. So that's how my index got started.

I eventually gave up the Webmaster job in 1996, but kept The On-Line Books Page,
since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great potential the Net had for
making literature available to a wide audience. At this point there are so many
books going on-line that I have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large
backlog of books to list). But I hope to keep up my on-line books works in some
form or another."