ANN ARBOR, Mich. – University of Michigan is offering free access to 25,000 early English books to the public, both online and in print.
The U-M Library, the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, and ProQuest are partnering to make public the manually transcribed texts from 1473-1700.
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The texts represent a significant portion of the estimated total output of English-language work published during the first two centuries of printing in England.
The release marks the completion of the first phase of the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), which allows early English books to be converted to online text. An anticipated 40,000 additional texts are set for release into the public domain in the next five years.
The transcribed texts are considered open data and available for anyone to read, reuse, reproduce, repurpose and distribute.