Wikipedia
Bartleby.com is an electronic text archive, headquartered in New York and named after Herman Melville's story " Bartleby, the Scrivener". It was founded under the name "Project Bartleby" in January 1993 by Steven H. van Leeuwen as a personal, non-profit collection of classic literature on the website of Columbia University. In February 1994 he published the first classic book in HTML, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. 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.
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". By January 2013, on its twentieth anniversary, more than one billion pages had been accessed.
The original founder is now chairman and president of the privately held company.