Bartleby.com is an electronic text

E-text

An e-text is, generally, any text-based information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding.E-text has the broad meaning of something electronic that represents words, a...

 archive, headquartered in New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and named after Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

's story "Bartleby the Scrivener

Bartleby the Scrivener

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by the American novelist Herman Melville . It first appeared anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 editions of Putnam's Magazine, and was reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in...

". It was founded under the name "Project Bartleby" in January 1993 by Steven H. van Leeuwen

Steven H. van Leeuwen

Steven van Leeuwen published the first book in HTML on the web in February 1994: Whitman's Leaves of Grass, as part of his experiment in Internet publishing begun a year earlier called Project Bartleby...

 as a personal, non-profit collection of classic literature on the website of Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. In February 1994 he published the first classic book in HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, Whitman's Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman . Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death...

. In 1997 it moved to its own domain, bartleby.com, and was called "The New Bartleby Library", where it continued to publish highly accurate transcriptions. In September 1999 Bartleby.com was incorporated and started to focus on reference works, including the contemporary 6th edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia

Columbia Encyclopedia

The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume encyclopedia produced by Columbia University Press and sold by the Gale Group. First published in 1935, and continuing its important relationship with Columbia University, the encyclopedia underwent major revisions in 1950 and 1963; the current edition is...

.

In June 2009, licensed reference works from Columbia University Press and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt were removed from the site "due to financial and usage considerations".

The original founder is now chairman and president of the privately held company.